November 2009 Archives

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Premiere! Our first big movie premiere! This was such a fun event! I didn't think that so many parents and siblings would come to this. It was great to mingle with the parents, talk with them about their kids and the hard work that they have done. Of course where is a party without food and drink! (that was a plus). We had activities for the families and students to do while they waited for everyone to arrive. There were three stations people could work on: stop-motion, chalk animation, and sand animation. The stop motion station used both "digital" materials and traditional art materials to spell out "Digital Workshop". The chalk animation said "Tales of Transformation". With both of the stations they used both additive and taking away elements to create animations that would be used on the DVDs the families would be receiving in the near future. The sand animation was just for play...plus who doesn't like playing in the sand! The viewings of all the stories of transformations were great. Everyone seemed to look seeing what everyone else had been working on for the last 4 weeks. What was also great about all of them was their styles were all different and they were all very creatively done. I think that it was really good to have the premiere on a different day than on the actual last day of the workshop. It would have been even harder to finish everything in time for that and would have been more stressful on everyone. All of them were amazing for the amount of time we really had to put all of these together. Everyone worked really hard and it paid off!

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So stressful would be one way of putting how today went...so much to do so little time to do it. Elise and I worked hard to make sure that all the files were in the right format, size, resolution, and in one place for the students. The students learned iMovie quickly and worked one on one with one of use to create and edit their own version of our story. With scene shots, it made it hard for them to create something totally different from the other student. But it gave them a structure so we would be able to get the movie done on time. With the short amount of time that was given to use to put together the inter movie and edit it with music, made things really hard to do. I think that it would have been better to have just used pre-made music in iMovie rather than introducing them to Garage Band. If we were going though introducing Garage band that it would have just been better to have an extra day just to devote to that not editing and writing music. Even having a couple weeks would have been nice to properly introduce the program to them and allow them to create a number of pieces to tell the moods of the story. There was a lot left do after the students left for the day. I think that having more time would have been nice to work on these animations. Having the digital methods workshop go a couple more weeks or even do it twice a week. This time would have been better because I feel that the students could have had a bigger part in the animation than they did. Yes, we tried to back off and let them do what they could but there was still just so much that needed to be done that we had to help.

Our sick student was back and well today! He jumped right in, helping animating sections of the story. He worked well in Photoshop and only need a little help when it came to the actual animation and rendering of the movie. Our other student also worked on other parts of the animation. Both seemed to not really like working with all of the layers! It seemed that they were getting bored and just wanted to be done with it. I think that is a problem with Photoshop animation, you have to be patient making all of the layers to create a good animation so it isn't jumpy. I know when I was working on some of the animations that we didn't get to in class; I was wishing that it could just animate itself. The process is very time consuming but think that the results are worth it. Like I said the student were trying to focus and get as much animation done as possible. But there was just so much that Elise and I split up remaining scenes so we would be ready for Day 5, when we really needed to get everything in iMovie and edit it. Elisa and I spoke with the kids and come up with the idea to make our animation like a silent movie with "scene shots" to tell the story rather than a narrator. So Elise created all of the scene shots, she also created opening and closing credits that look really great!

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Once again, one of our students was gone again due to illness. To prepare for today's workshop to conserve time and so the students would be allowed more time to work on the animation step faster (so we would be able to finish our movie in time), I created all of the backgrounds after figuring out what we needed. As a little art "joke"-inside joke, I created all of the backgrounds with little hints of Van Gogh's artwork. If you look closely enough you might be able to see those bits. Also they are more complex to look different from the simple characters and so they characters would stand out against the backgrounds.  We worked again on the characters and we also did our second animation technique which was paint animation. It was a little hard at first but seemed to go better after a while of getting use to the material. I think that it turned out pretty good. It was a hard scene to animate in the first place: the horse transforming into to the prince. But we thought that it would be easier to animate in paint instead of in Photoshop. With the paint it allowed us to manipulate things more in our control than the computer would allow. We also felt bad that one of our students was not there for most of the creation of the project. So we created a little movie to explain what we were working on, I used Photoshop to make the files into a little movie for the student to view so he would feel like even though he was not there, he was still part of the process and to also get him thinking about ideas for what we could do with our story. This is a good/creative way of communicating with students on a long going project to keep them sparked with interest.

Here are the backgrounds:

Outside Cottage

Inside Cottage

Forest

Outside Castle

Inside Castle

Garden

Garden Wedding

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I worked with Elise on "Beauty and the Horse", a version of Beauty and the Beast from the Netherlands. We found it on the fairy tales website that was given to use by our instructor. Being that our story was from the Netherlands, we thought it would be perfect to use Vincent Van Gogh as our inspiration for our color palette, who was a Dutch artist. Not only was he a wonderful choice for colors but he also acted as our influence for the style of our animation. Since we were also dealing with a story that has a horse in it, we also used Franz Marc as inspiration as well. He was the artist that did the "Blue Horses". At first I was really nervous because at first no one wanted to work on our story...but we got two great students to work with us. Sadly enough today one of our students was sick already sick so he could not be with us when we introduced the project. The boy that was sick was the same one that I worked with him the first day. Our other student was a good worker. She was amazing! She created and designed all of the characters the first day; she also made sure to use the color palette to create the characters.

Here is our color palette that we were working with:

Here are the characters meet Father, Beauty, Horse, and Prince:

Father

Beauty

Horse

Prince

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Today was the first day of Digital Art Workshop. We worked in Photoshop using additive process to create an animation of transformation. The student that I was working with knew a lot about Photoshop and didn't want too much help and wanted it by himself. He seemed to be bored during the introduction and just wanted to work on his project and didn't want to listen to instruction. The only thing that he needed help with was to remember to make layers every once and a while. Which I know personally how hard it is to make sure to make layers every so often to make sure that the final animation is not "jumpy". I had the same problems when I was working on my own example project. He seemed to like the project and was having fun turning himself into a dog. But at the same time he didn't seem to like the fact that it was such a repetitive process from creating all of the layers.

Here is an example of the animation technique we did: