Great environmental animations

Here are a few environmental animations. I am beginning to research these for a project next year. I will be sharing these with students:

Thinking Outside The Box wins Best Fine Art Movie in California Student Media Festival!

I was very excited to learn today that Thinking Outside the Box is a winner in the 44th Annual California Student Media Festival. It won the Elementary School Fine Arts category. There is only one winner in each category for the entire state of California. It is now eligible for the Grand Prize which is $1,000. 00; money which would be well used at Cureton Elementary in Alum Rock, San Jose.
















You can see the movie here at SchoolTube. I am very proud of all the Fourth and Fifth Grade students at Cureton Elementary School who created this animation with me last spring and am very grateful to Ms. Arlene U. Illa for opening up her 4/5 combo classroom to so many sessions of my workshop animation project. It takes a great leap of faith for a teacher to gift his/her teaching time to an arts instructor and I take that gift of time seriously and try to put my best effort into creating useful curriculum in the time I have with the students.

More on the concept behind this animation on this posting and this one.

Artifacts from Heinlenville for student animation

It is very exciting to now have a few artifacts on hand to start building the history based animation project. Last weekend my daughter and I attended the Spirit of Japantown Festival in San Jose and met with Connie Young Yu. We were able to look at archeological artifacts from the Heinlenville dig. Connie had the great suggestion that I provide the workshop students with magnifying glasses to get a closer look at the objects. It was a great honor for me to meet Connie Young Yu and I had just completed reading her book Chinatown San Jose, USA. I also read an essay of hers in the book Life along the Guadalupe River- an Archeological and Historical Journey. Her writings bring to life the experiences of early Chinese immigrants in San Jose.


















Above: Small poreclain bowls. Collection of Connie Young Yu



















Above: Chinese and United States coins. These coins were found in the money box from Connie Young Yu's grandparent's store, Quong Wo Chan. Collection of Connie Young Yu

















Above and below: Bricks from the Heinlenville archeological excavation. These bricks are from 1887! They were probably created by Chinese labor. The above brick is from the steps of the Ng Shing Gung Temple. There is a recreation of this temple (using many original elemnents) at the San Jose History Park.



















The above brick is from 34 Cleveland Avenue, the site of the Quong Wo Chan store.The name of this general store meant Peaceful, Splendid Place.

I look forward to sharing these artifacts with the children.
Below is a more detailed description of this project.

CONCEPT FOR ANIMATION WORKSHOP SERIES:
This workshops series explores the history of San Jose's Heinlenville and Japantown. Students at two Santa Clara County schools will work with clay and paper to recreate archeological dig artifact fragments which they will transform into whole objects. The objects will be animated and transformed to tell an intimate and personal story that brings the history of these communities to life.

HISTORY AND CULTURAL COMPONENT:
Heinlenville was a walled community created in response to arson and was the last of six San Jose Chinatowns. John Heinlen was a German immigrant who established himself in San Jose as a businessman and a farmer. He assiseted the Chinese by building a walled community for them after a sereis of arson attacks reduced thier community to ashes. San Jose's Japantown sprung up to surround Heinlenville. Japantown abruptly disappeared when Japanese Americans were interned during WWII. Japantown emerged again in the same location when some families returned to the area after Internment.
Archeologists form the Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State Univeristy and local San Jose historians worked with the Redevelopment Agency of the City of San Jose to unearth selected areas of Helinlenville and early Japantown.

GOAL:
The workshop series will culmulate in five minute films exploring the lives fo Chinese and Japanese people who worked in the agricultural industries of San Jose in the late 1800's to the mid 1900's. The exploration will be accomplished through the study of artifact fragements uncovered in recent excavations. The benefits of the workshop series are:
1. Exposure to the many stepped process of stop motion animation
2. Team Building and problem solving skills through an engaging and fun artistic endeavor
3.Enhancement of visual and verbal communication skills
4. Introduction to archeology through hands-on use of archeological dig artifacts and the reading of archeological research literature.
5. Knowledge of local California history

AUDIENCE REACHED:
This workshop series will be conducted at two schools at far ends of Santa Clara County after Star Testing in May.

At Horace Cureton Elementary School of Alum Rock, San Jose, 84% of the students are Hispanic and many have argricultural labor roots. The family histories of Chinese and Japanese laborers working in the strawberry fields and canneries of the late 1800's to mid 1900's may resonate with the children. This will heighten their cultural understanding and enrich them with the ability to see common threads of experience in different cultures.

At Stevens Creek Elementary School of Cupertino 63% of the students are Asian and many of these are first and second generation Asian American children of highly educated parents working in technology industries. Learing about past Asian immigrants who came to work in very different conditions will increase their appreciation for past immigrant experiences and the ground they paved for future generations.

I am now trying to find funding to bring these workshops to life in the spring. Last year we were able to obtain a grant from the Alum Rock Education Foundation for material costs for my animation workshops at Horace Cureton. I am hoping to identify and target a few more grant sources so that this is not an entirely volunteer endeavor.

San Jose History in Animation Workshop

Ever since I read about an archeological excavation of the walled Chinatown of Heinlenville in Japantown, San Jose, I have been brewing ideas on how to explore the amazing rich history of this area in art. At first I conceptualized a dance piece in which I would create the sets from fragments simulation excavation artifacts, but then over the past month or so I have been thinking more along the lines of animation. I teach simple stop motion animation in elementary schools and conducted a few workshops this summer. I now visualize creating a lesson plan that invites the student to look at archeological artifacts and bring them to life through the stories of people who lived in and have memories of Heinlenville and Nihonmachi.

I envision the children creating their animated stories with clay and drawings. Above: I created a rough animated sketch of a bowl fragment becoming a bowl from which strawberry emerge from the porcelain pattern and Chinese workers grow out of the double happiness symbol. Many of the Chinese who came to San Jose worked in the Strawberry fields.

















Above: sample shoe box with frame and pottery inside. I envision groups of children creating a shoebox diorama in which the archeological artifacts emerge from the fragments and transform to tell an intimate personal story of past lives in Heinlenville and early Japantown.

It would be fantastic to use actual fragments from the dig as reference images for such transformation sequences. And, of course, there would be music as well as narration which would give more information on the history. I can see a half dozen artifact come to life somehow and offer a small intimate detail of life in Heinlenville or Japantown, little stories that give a taste of life in these communities.

Above is a super rough storyboard I created inspired by a quote I read on a bench in Nihonmachi, San Jose. Narration is by my nine year old son. There are benches throughout San Jose's Japantown etched with quotes from individuals relating stories of the old communities. This quote caught my eye as it talked about children watching a man making noodles by jumping up and down on a pole. I just couldn't visualize this process so I researched it. How do you jump up and down on a bamboo pole? I found this amazing video on bamboo noodle making. It shows how it is done, it takes hours to do and it is both a beautiful and brutal process.

Below: bench in front of the Ken Ying Low building in San Jose's Japantown.

Final Animation Camp Screening

This morning we had the screening of all four of the summer camp animations. I am having difficulty posting the final flash animations on the blog, perhaps the sizes are too big. At any rate, I have posted the final animations on my YouTube site.

Here is the Vanity Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHYzw1LCSLk&feature=channel_page

Here is the Teamwork Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfNmTwGfjw&feature=channel_page

Here is the Funny Crazy Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Uccwm36yU&feature=channel_page

Here is the Discoveries in the Garden Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRG6LkL7fbs&feature=channel_page

We were very fortunate to have Raquel Coelho as a guest speaker. Ms. Coelho is an Animation professor at San Jose State University and has worked at many animation house in The San Francisco Bay Area. She shared her puppet making process with the children and parents. She was a wonderfully engaging speaker and she had a lot of materials to share.














































Below: Some of the puppet making materials Raquel brought in.



















Below: Puppet figure from one of her books.























Raquel also brought some of her beautifully illustrated children books from Brazil. The illustrations were photos of lovely shadow boxes depicting in puppets the history of theater from around the world. For the conclusion she shared with us a wonderful short animation she worked on called Moon Girl. Below: Raquel brought in one of her shadow box pieces. This one depicts the famous photographer Eadweard Muybridge.























Detail:

Animation Camp Session 2, rough drafts of animations

Here are the rough drafts of animations from the second session of animation camp. The children were really creative and I loved the different stories each came up with. The children imported each of their still images into Premiere Elements. The audio they recorded on the last day of the workshop. I cleaned up these sound files with the freeware Audacity. This animation, The Funny Crazy Animation, is almost completed. Audio is inserted. I will do a little Photoshop retouch to eliminate some of the string and wire supports. The end credit text will also be added.



The tales in the animation Discoveries in the Garden all have garden or park scenes. The figures in this group worked quite well with the magnet feet and cookie tray. I will be doing a little bit of Photoshop retouching of wires and such in this animation as well.


We will be having a screening of the children's work next Monday. We are also fortunate to have Raquel Coelho present a few of her animations, her puppets and children's books during this gathering. She is a professor in the Animaiton Department at San Jose State and has worked at DreamWorks and other Bay Area animation studios. I am really excited to see her work in person and know the children will be inspired by her work, too. She has been very gracious in agreeing to speak to us. We were also very lucky to have a tour at De Anza College's Animation Department with this group as well last Thursday.

Animation Camp Week 2, Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of my second session of children's stop motion animation camp. I am really learning along side the children and it is so inspiring to see their creativity in process. I especially enjoy hearing them encourage each other. This session I have the assistance of my niece and an older student entering Junior High who has been in two of my workshops. It is wonderful to have their help.

I have found that egg cartons work great for storing and staging small clay parts. For simple animation sequences this is a good way to introduce children to stop motion. The children started off creating a sequence in which clay cubes transform into two different objects and back to a cube.
































































































In the first class they created the transforming cube parts and larger people. The people were built up on twisted floral wire stick figures. Their feet are taped down to magnets. We did this to experiment with them standing on cookie sheets. I am hoping that the magnets on their feet will be able to support them on metal cookie sheets, but the magnets I used may not be strong enough once all the clay is added, in which case, we will also have wire supports behind the figure that we will try to hide.
I love the personalities of each of these figures. The children had a blast using a pasta maker to create sheets of clay for clothing. We also had a clay extruder to make strands of hair.










































































































































Storyboarding was also introduced in this first day. In fact, they did not touch any clay until they had a storyboard for their transforming cubes. We looked at sample storyboards from past students and we looked at samples online. After the children completed their storyboard and cube parts, they sketched their clay people. They were told that these figures were to interact with their magical transforming cubes. After the people were completed the children created detailed storyboards for that interaction.

Day 1:
Introduction to storyboarding
Create transforming cubes (place parts in egg cartons)
Sketch characters to interact with the cubes
Create clay figures over wire armatures (in our case thread covered floral wire and magnet feet)
Create detailed storyboard for interaction of figure with transforming cube

Last day of Animation workshop 1

Today was the last day of the animation workshop. It was an intense week of working and I think all of us were quite tired by today. I know that the children all have a renewed appreciation for the animations they see in movies and TV. It is a lot of concentration and hard work for so few seconds! Yesterday they had a very interesting tour of De Anza's Colleges Animation Department. It was good for them to know that a really excellent animation program is right here in Cupertino. Today the students recorded sound using the freeware Audacity and they imported the image files. They will add music later.

Below is the rough draft that the three boys created. Their story is about a few pet shop animals that try to escape a pet shop but then are caught again. Each animal tries to escape the shop on his own and is caught. When they are put in the same cage they use teamwork to escape and sail home in paper boats they find. The final animation will be two minutes and a music track will be added as well. All the still images and audio files were inserted into Premier Elements by the children. There is very little dialog here. They had fun creating the sound effects using paper, water in a tupperware, my creaky door and rattling keys.
Teamwork Animation:


The three girls' animation was focused on vanity and the bad consequence of it. A group of fairies are invited to a party. Two of the fairies wear big puffy showy dresses and fail to realize that it is a bowling party even though the older wiser fairy advises them not to be so dressy. The two fairies brag about how beautiful they are. At the bowling alley, one overdressed fairy knocks down a little girl's drink with her big fancy skirt. The overdressed fairies bowl terribly. They end up learning their lesson and have a yard sale to sell the big puffy dresses. The girls created a lot of dialog and even wrote out their script. There will be music added to this animation. All the still images and audio files were inserted into Premier Elements by the children.
Vanity Animation:

Day Three of Claymation, Pet Shop and Fairy Party

Today the children started filming their animations. We had two stages and two cameras working. Here the girls are filming their fairies. We filmed in my garage. Thankfully it was not super hot today! It did get hot with all the lights, though. The children rotated through roles of director, animator and camera person.


































The girls picked flowers from my garden to decorate the set. I love the elegant feel. Each of the girls spent a lot of time carefully creating their sets and costumes. They created wings of floral wire (24 gauge). They cut lace and fabric and then hot melted the material to the wings. The wings were tied on with fishing thread. We use this fishing thread to make the fairies fly, too.
















































































This fairy was created by Brittany, the oldest girl in the group. I really like how she styled the hair and the outfit she created. All the girl's garments are quite sophisticated in color and style. The next fairy down is Nina's and the bottom one is Kadin's.














































Here the boys are filming scenes from their pet store animation.
They used the shadow set back lighting a lot. It was interesting listening to the boys verses the girls. The boys were quite silent in their interaction as they snapped their shots. The girls were much more verbal in discussing their shots and each move. It was an entertaining contrast!




















































































Below: Perhaps my favorite frame of the whole animation. Mitchell took this bug eye view of being caught in the net.

Stop Motion Animation Class Day 2

Today the children created most of their sets and refined their storyboards. It was a busy second day as we plan to start filming tomorrow.
Below: a few sketches from yesterday and the cages and animals created by the boys:











































Shadow set for Ed's insect:
















































Shadow puppet parts for Mitchell's Thorny Devil desert scene:






























Cole used a lot of real plant materials for his sets both in the cage and for the main set. It will be interesting to see how he uses these for his shadow elements.


































The boys created smaller version of their animals to sail away in paper boats in the conclusion of the movie. These animals will also be used in the main pet shop scene. Ed taught the other boys how to make paper boats.






































The main stage for the boys set. The Pet Shop doors will slide open to show the pet store.

















Lights for the pet store.

















The girls created the set parts for their fairy story. Large trees were created of wallpaper sample sheets spray mounted onto tag board. These trees are in the background.

















Sketches:





































































They also created element for the shadow screen. These they created of real plant materials
from the yard. We hot melted these to wooden boards. This will be dramatic when back lit against the shadow screen.

















Below: images of the fairy set in progress:



































Creating the fairy party invites.























Doll in dress. The girls challenged themselves to create costuming for their fairies. Tomorrow they will make the wings and the rest of the dresses and the children will start filming!