I’d like to thank the academy!

Two students in Dartmouth High School’s Video and Digital Media class earned honorable mentions this week in a statewide video competition sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.

The students, Natalie Gonsalves and Sal Nav “JJ” Esterlin, were tasked with making a 30 to 60 second stop motion public service announcement video explaining rules for bicycling on the road.

Gonsalves said they mostly used Legos as the figures in the video with paper backgrounds to set the scene.

Students in the class worked on the stop motion project for two to three weeks, according to Gonsalves, and got to decide at the end if they wanted to submit it to the MassDOT contest.

Lucky for Gonsalves and Esterlin, they submitted their project and were awarded the “honorable mention” distinction — or third place — at a virtual conference on Dec. 9.

Gonsalves said she was happy with the way the video turned out, even though the process was harder than she envisioned.

“It was a lot more difficult than I thought,” she said. “If one of the pieces falls down you have to put it back up in the same position and hope you did it right.”

“Some of the frames were a little jumpy, but otherwise it went really well,” she added.