by Ian Sands
Authors of children’s books are
among a select group of people that share something very unique. They get to
experience their characters that previously existed only in their minds brought
to life by an illustrator. Can you imagine the excitement when the author sees
her character for the first time? I recently was able to be a facilitator for
just such an experience. It all started with an email.
Jordan Lane, a kindergarten
teacher at Douglas Elementary Arts and Science Magnet in Raleigh, North
Carolina, started the idea for the lesson. While searching the web, she found
an animation project that my Apex students had created working with other
elementary school art students in the past. Ms. Lane emailed me and asked if
our Computer Art class wanted to collaborate with her Kindergarten class. She
had some tigers that needed animating. We pounced on the opportunity.
Since my students had
previously created simple animations, I wanted them to work on a higher-level
animation project. I decided we could work a dialog lesson into the project and
make the tigers talk. I floated the idea back to Ms. Lane and she agreed.
Kindergarten Tiger Paintings
As a class, Ms. Lane’s
Kindergarteners read the book Close Your
Eyes by Kate Banks about a young tiger that has a hard time falling
asleep. Throughout the book the
tiger’s mom reassures him that when he goes to sleep he can dream about
anything he wants. After reading
the story, students painted the tiger on the cover of the book and then worked
in partners to create their own baby/mother tiger interpretation of the story
to share with the class.
Not long after that, I received
a link to a Dropbox folder full of tiger paintings. The tiger paintings were so
cool that the idea of them simply talking seemed sort of boring. I spoke to
some of my animation students about having the tigers sing instead. They were
right on board.
Soon, our crack team of Apex
animators was learning about dialog, selecting songs, and transforming the
painted tigers to singing animations.
Making the Tigers Sing
My students imported the tiger
paintings into Photoshop. The most basic of animated dialog requires only eight
mouth positions needed to represent the different vowels and consonants. The
students used Photoshop’s painting capabilities to recreate the tiger’s mouth,
creating one new mouth for each of the eight positions. Their goal was to match
these new mouths so each looked as if it were still part of the original
painting.
The time it took to create
these images gave each student a chance to think about what songs the tigers
would sing. Clever selections such as Eye Of the Tiger, Hakuna Matata, and The
Lion Sleeps Tonight were chosen.
After completing all the
necessary tiger mouth positions, each new image was imported into Adobe Flash
and the tedious part of the project began. Each word of the song had to be
listened to over and over again to realize which of the eight mouth positions
would match best. Even though we kept the song clip lengths down to around
fifteen seconds, it still took over a week to complete this part of the
project.
Making the tigers sing was
tricky enough but some of the students wanted a little more. I really enjoyed
watching them experiment with the animation. A wink of a tiger’s eye here, a
twitch of the ear there…these little extras gave the tigers personality.
When the animations were
complete, I posted them to Vimeo so Ms. Lane could share them with her class.
She let me know what a great experience this had been for her students. They were able see their artwork become
something unimaginable in their eyes.
Ian Sands is an art teacher at Apex High School in Apex, North Carolina.
This article was published in the April 2014 SchoolArts.
No comments:
Post a Comment