Thinking Outside the Box Final Animation!

The animation is completed!
At a school with no computer lab we did something pretty fun and innovative on super low budget. We created this stop motion animation using a borrowed laptop, a $15 dollar mike, two still digital cameras, clay, two small stages and an assortment of freeware and donated software.

I just ran the voice files through another filter in my audio editing software (freeware called Audacity) to completely eliminate the humming. It turned out that I had the "gain" volume up all the way on my digital microphone when I recorded. I now know better. I thought this would make the volume of the speaker louder. Turning the gain up all the way actually makes the microphone pick up all the ambient noise around...fridge, air conditioner, rustling paper, etc. It takes a bit of digital acrobatics to eliminate the ambient noise and get the voices clear.

The children had gotten a taste of using the freeware Audacity in class when I recorded them and they tried some filters on their files to clean them up or make their recorded voices louder.

The children did a great job with this very involved animation project. I was very impressed that they challenged themselves to create two transformations for their cubes rather than the one transformation I had suggested. I hadn't planned on that and was happily surprised to see how well the two transformations worked out.



On Tuesday (if my family doesn't get hit by the flu I had last week) I will be going into Horace Cureton to give each child his/her DVD of the animation and to give them a hands on demo of the software I used. I will have a few students try out editing some of their clay images in Photoshop and a few will import into Premiere Elements. It would be great for them to have a taste of the software used. This workshop series was composed of 8 one and a half hour sessions in the classroom, plus the additional editing time in my studio. I can't believe it is done!

Horace Cureton Thinking Outside The Box Animation

We are slowly finalizing the Thinking Outside the Box animation. I hope to have it completed this weekend so that I can burn copies for each student. This morning I started the online application process for the International Student Media Festival. Below is the animation with voice and music. The music here is a test performance and I inserted it just to see how the pacing fits in. I though it might feel slow, but I think it is just right. I had to splice the music (in the dog to girl sequence) and know that I need to do it a bit better. Anyway, these guitarists are elementary and junior high school students who meet every Saturday at JSP Guitar and Sound Studio in Sunnyvale.

Horace Cureton will be showing it to their student on the 11th. I think they did a great job.

Claymation Day Seven

Today we recorded the final voices. Some children were quite shy speaking into the microphone and I can understand why as this is not a natural or familiar thing to do. There are only two audio files I need to really work with more. I hope to insert those tomorrow. They did a great job with all these new experiences and challenges. Each child spoke a sentence or two about what thinking outside the box means. The average length was five seconds of audio per child. This fit pretty well with their animations. I used the freeware, Audacity, for the sound recording and editing.

Next week on June 2nd I'll be going back to show the children their movie. This weekend I'll be burning 31 or so DVD's for the students (29 students, teacher and The Alum Rock Education Foundation). I'll also be burning DVD's for the student guitar ensemble that will be providing the music track.
Here is the animation so far. The music will be the next element added:

Claymation Day Six, breather sequences and sound

Yesterday was the sixth day of the animation workshop at Horace Cureton Elementary. The children filmed three breather sequences which I inserted in between sections of their animation. They did a fantastic job! It was nice to see them use a concept from the Sony Bravia Bunnies video as I think actually trying these cube movements gave them a better understanding of how time consuming and precise that particular stop motion animation was

This animation workshop series is the first time these 29 4th/5th grade students have created a stop motion animation. We have not completed the animation yet, but the results so far are beyond what I had expected. There is a combination of planned organization and free form creativity that is required of each child. I like conducting these animation workshops as they require each child to exercise a blend of different skill sets. Most importantly, it is a project that is impossible without teamwork.







































TEST ANIMATION WITHOUT SOUND:


Above is the animation so far with all the stop motion parts inserted. It needs to be tweaking it a bit. The pacing will be adjusted (credit screens will linger longer). I also need to add a few credit screens to give credit to the Alum Rock Education Foundation for the mini grant, the egg company for the egg carts and a few other people who have made making this animation workshop possible. I also want to add a few process screens at the end showing the kids at work making the animation. These kind of images at the end of animations are always fun...kind of a peek behind the magic.

What remains is the voice recording and the music. I hope I can get this completed in the next week. I estimate that the final run time will be five minutes as I will need to lengthen each animation sequence to match the voice for each child. I also might break up the animation sequences a bit more. I placed the third breather at the very end, but I think I need to divide up the animations a bit more. I'll be experimenting with that.

VOICE RECORDING
We also started recording their voices yesterday. This was an interesting challenge as the air conditioner would turn on and off frequently and was very, very loud. Also, an elementary classroom is no sound stage...you just cannot expect kids to be totally silent as they needed to be working on other assignments as I recorded their voices one by one.
I hope the ambient noise will filter out OK. I borrowed a pop filter from a friend and that will hopefully help at least with the voices a bit.

MUSIC
A guitar ensemble group of elementary and junior high school students will be recording the music...an original composition titled "Marching Ants." More on that in another posting.

Got up at 5:00am to complete this animation build here.. Kind of can't see it clearly anymore and need to work on other projects now.

Claymation Day Five

Yesterday we filmed the last of the children's animation sequences. Here are some still images from the sequences from yesterday. I will be editing out the post behind the flower in this animation sequence below. The post was used in a few other sequences where it will have to be removed.













































































































































































We had a second stage set up again. This was very helpful. We used two thick sheets of foam core boards. A light from Ikea and a borrowed light from De Anza College's Euphrat Museum's Arts in The Schools Program. Second camera and camera stand also borrow, although I have order a second camera of my own that should be here by Friday.



















SOUND RECORDING
We will begin sound recording on Friday. I was supposed to go in today but my son has a headache and is feeling sick so this recording will be done on Friday.

BREATHER SEQUENCES
We will be using colored cubes of different colored sides to create the breather sequences. The cubes will move across the stage and turn on their sides. I hope to film three of these sequences to break up the animation into sections. Two sequences would be fine, too. The children will have fun with this as instead of one animator there will be 9 or ten kids moving cubes around the stage at any one time. It will be fun and crazy.


















Part of the first stage folded up and ready to take back to my studio. This also can double as a shadow puppet stage. For this set up we draped a black cloth over the back and had a patterned floor for the stage. The blue painters tape was useful to hold a lot of things in place: cables, camera tripods, lights, stage parts...etc.

Claymation Day Four

Here are 19 of the 29 animation sequences. I will be filming a few more at lunchtime tomorrow at Horace Cureton Elementary then again on Tuesday. Luckily I was able to borrow a second digital camera and camera stand from my friend, Melanie Woodard. She has been so generous with supplies for so many of my workshops. I have purchased a second camera, but it will take a while to ship so this worked out well. I also have been lucky to have great lights lent to me from De Anza College's Euphrat Museum's Arts In The Schools Program. I purchased various lights from Ikea in addition to the two lent from De Anza and the set up seems to be working fine. I have had to adjust the levels just a bit in Photoshop on a few animation sequences and I erased out fingers and blocks of clay in a few to make it appear that objects float. Some day it would be nice to have a longer workshop series at the school and lots of computers to show the kids how to do this image editing themselves.



BREATHER SEQUENCES
I am having the students brainstorm on breather sequences, or sequences to break up the monotony of the continuous box morphing. I am hoping to film two of these sequences on Tuesday.

SOUND RECORDING
I also hope to start the sound recording on Tuesday. This I will have to refine a bit as I need to have very short phrases or statements from each child to go with each animation and as you can see, the animations flash by fast. I think I will have to have lengthen the time lingered on one of their object morphs to get the animation to match the voice length.

INTERNATIONAL ANIMATION FESTIVAL
I am hoping that we can enter the completed animation into the International Student Media Festival. It would be really wonderful for these student to feel a part of a larger creative community. I have asked the festival for a deadline extension, so we will see if we can enter. The deadline is May 30th and we need a bit more time to complete it and ship out the DVD. I would really love for the kids to be aware of these festivals and check out other student created movies and animations from other parts of the United States and from around the world. The exciting thing is if their movie gets selected as a finalist, it will be screened at the festival.

I noticed that this above uploaded animation in Flash is kind of blurry and that my previous Windows Media player ones were clearer, but some people were having problems viewing the Windows Media Player so I am hoping that the Flash above is more universally viewable.

Day Three of Claymation

Today the students finished up their tween frames and eight students shot their animation sequences. Here are all of the animations filmed today. I will play with the speed a bit later but wanted to get the animation up so that the children could see it. Each sequence was roughly 16 frames. I will have two cameras on tripods and two stages tomorrow so that we can film twice as much in one day. (Thanks Melanie for lending my your digital camera and tripod!)


Here is the first group of three rotating through the roles of animator, director, and camera person. On Thursday I will be back at Horace Cureton to film more and will start the sound recording of the voices. I was looking at my project outline last night and realized that I was over ambitious in what we could accomplish in eight classes. In re evaluation I have decide to eliminate the set design component and the importing of the images into Premiere Elements. I will demo to them how I do this at the end of the classes, though.

The egg cartons are working out great.

Day Two of Animation Workshop

Before animation class today I stopped over at Olivera Egg Ranch to pickup donated egg cartons for the children's clay parts. I had contacted the egg ranch on Friday and they set aside 30 cartons for me. It was very conveient as they are just three miles away from the school. It was great to have these as they don't take up much room and the kids could set in the parts and see the sequencing from frame to frame.


















Above: Ms. Illa's clay parts for the transition of a cube to a snail to a star.

First we reviewed vocabulary and concepts from Class 1 and then it was time to hand out the clay. It took me a while to get all the start and end cubes set up for each child and the sequencing from one child to another documented but once they got started they were really focused and had fun. You just can't have a bad time with bright clay! They had a blast creating their little creatures and objects. They enjoyed using the pasta maker and the clay extruder tool I purchased specifically for their claymation. Tomorrow they will be completing their tween clay parts and hopefully some will begin filming.























Above: Pasta Maker. It will never see pasta. It will always be a dedicated clay tool.

Claymation! Day One and prep for Day Two

I conducted my first class of "Thinking Outside the Box" last Thursday. I presented three cultural legends that revolved around magic boxes and showed an inspiration claymation animation ad (Sony Bravia Bunnies as well as "the make of" movie for that ad). I also showed a simple box to butterfly claymation animation. This was a demo for the specific project they would be creating. Below is a recap of what they learned and what I learned.







































Above: two of the books I read to the class. The other legend, Pandora's box I summarized from a Greek mythology book I brought in.

BRAINSTORMING
Their first activity was to brainstorm ideas for their box transformations. I provided each child a sheet of paper with four squares. They were instructed to draw an image in each square that represented a different transformation concept. I explained what brainstorming was. I walked around and we shared some ideas. I pulled some ideas from what the children were drawing so that their classmates would get a feel for the variety of ideas they could throw out. I explained there was no such thing as a bad idea to share. Often we have to get the not so useful ideas out first to uncover to the ideas that are truly creative and outside the box.






















Above: Brainstorming handout

LESSON I LEARNED:
What I should have done here was draw four boxes up on the board and then called up four different students to draw a different idea in each box. This would have reinforced the idea that each child needed four different concepts on the brainstorm paper. As it was, even though I went from table to table and explained this again and again, it was still confusing to some of the students. Some treated the four squares as storyboard squares to show the progression of one idea.

I will review and reinforce this brainstorm idea tomorrow when I go in for the second class. This brainstorming concept is a tough concept even for adults. I have instructed a Visual Thinking class in the Engineering Department of Stanford University and found that it is very difficult for many to throw out ideas and brainstorm. The reason being no one wants to give a dumb or "wrong" idea. Many of us are taught not to share ideas unless they are fully formed and "correct". But often it is these very off beat or "wrong" ideas that trigger a better idea.

CHILDREN'S BRAINSTORM:
What each child came up with for their box transformation animation sequence is listed below. They each decide to create two transformations. We'll see how that works with our 15 frames. Ms. Illa took the time to review after my workshop on Thursday. She sent me this list of the kids' ideas.

Butterfly to puddle
snail to star
flower to umbrella
egg to eagle
tadpole to frog
fish to turtle
bee to butterfly
puddle to ice cream
shark to whale
fish to mermaid
guitar to bat (I can't wait to see this one...could have cool audio)
fish to elephant
colors to paint
seed to flower
boat to banana
turtle to basketball
egg to robot
book to TV
flying fish to bird
hammerhead shark to hammer
puppy to person
shark to hockey stick
whale to person

ROUGH STORYBOARDING with KEY FRAMES
The students second activity was to draw in the key frames of their animation story. They needed to choose one idea from the brainstorm sheet and work out the animation sequence they would create with their cubes of clay.



















Above: Storyboard handout.

The essential idea here was to begin with the key frames.
Step 1: They were instructed to take their chosen concept image from the brainstorm sheet and draw it into key frame 8 (the middle dark outlined box)
Step 2: The next frame they were to fill in was the key frame 5 (dark outlined box on top row). This image should be a shape that took the cube half way to being the final object.

I explained that drawing key frames was simply like creating a visual version of a written outline. In a written outline for a story or book report we start with the key points and place them under the headings "I., II, III, etc." These are the main ideas or points. In a written outline we then add in the supporting information indented under "A, B, C, etc." These are the tween frames in animation.

A visual key frame is that same as these initial first points written down for an outline. It is a visual representation of what happens in the briefest words. For example. The box turns into a butterfly is the main idea for my demo animation. Key frame 8 is a drawing of a butterfly.

LESSON I LEARNED:
What I should have done here was draw these 15 boxes up on the board and walk them through the process on the board. Mrs. Illa educated me on a technique called "Shout Out" where you bring up one student from the class to stand near you at the board. I ask a question. That student then picks the other students to answer my question and then that same student standing with me repeats and relays that information from the class to me. Somehow this telling another student your answer, rather than the instructor, helps focus the students and makes the activity more engaging. I will try this out tomorrow with my summary recap of our first lesson.

I also need to review that each frame, each box on the storyboard page, represents a click of the camera. A frame is one of the 15 still images they will be taking for their animation. Another student (in the roll of director) will need to be able to take this storyboard sheet and instruct you on how to move your clay parts for each frame.

CLASS 2 PREVIEW
In the second class we will be starting to create the clay parts for the animation. I have been struggling with how to store all these small parts for each child. On Friday I woke up thinking "Egg cartons!" Yep, that was my waking thought...take that as pathetic or inspired. It can be either. Anyway, after getting my children to school I googled local egg distributers and knew I had to reach out to an egg distributer in the area of Alum Rock. I learned this when I solicited boxes initially from Whole Foods in Cupertino and was informed by the manager that they donated only locally. At any rate, I was fortunate to find Olivera Egg Ranch on Sierra Road not far from Horace Cureton Elementary School. They generously offered me 30 cartons. My problem solved. I will pick these up before class tomorrow.


















One of the nice things about teaching this class is that I can communicate with images and thoughts on my blog as well. The class has access to the internet and I will be inserting info for them into these postings.

Tomorrow each child will first be given an egg carton.

1. They will write their name on top of it.
   
2. They will write their name on the side.
3. Each child will be given two different colors of clay.
   
4. These two cubes are not mushed or changed. One is placed into the first egg carton scoop cavity and the second goes into the last scoop cavity. The first cube is frame one, the starting cube for the child's animation. The second cube placed at the end of the tray is the ending cube of the different color.
   
5. Each child is then given two more cubes of the first color to create the key frame objects from their storyboards (images in key frame 5 and 8).
6. Each child is given a second cube the color of the ending cube. This color is to be used as accent parts for the transformed object. i.e. the spots on the butterfly.

More clay will be handed out as needed.
I will have a pasta maker machine to help flatten the clay as well as a clay extruder tool. I hope that each child will complete their key frames. It would be great if some tables actually completed all their tween frames as well, but we'll see. If they do complete them we can start filming the following day while the other groups complete their clay parts.