GovSchoolWeek1--Great Group of Students

Saturday was the end of classes for week 1 of the Virginia Governor's Residential School of Math, Science and Technology at Lynchburg College. I've had a chance to get to know the students and we've made huge progress in getting everyone launched on their own animation project.

You'd think I lived in the lab for the amount of gear I bring to class every day.

It's really nice to see how the students bond to each other quickly and all seem to be having a really good time. I really appreciate how happy they all seem and how much they are focusing on their work. 

I have to encourage all of the students to take a break, they are so focused. Austin, Ezzy, Ryan and Adriana.

I like to start the students off with really simple blank keyframe projects, either lightning or fireworks, so they really grasp the idea of working on a timeline. Many of them had done video editing, which of course deals with the same issues. Next were sequential keyframes to build animation that replicated building a castle brick by brick.  It seems a bit odd to feel so strongly that this is a great way to introduce Flash because I am quite sure they will never use either of these techniques exclusively to produce an animation again.

These two simple animation projects completed, next step is to develop their own animated character short, very short. Out come the notebooks for conceptualizing and a sketches. This always takes some work on my part to get students interested in thinking about what they want to do away from the computer. They generally want to jump right in. I certainly understand, that's human nature. This is an important step, I love these notebooks and the opportunities they offer to chill and let the ideas percolate.

Ryan working on this animation.

These are some of the shorts that I have the students watch as they are thinking about doing their own project.  PIxar's Luxo and another an ad which is also credited to Pixar. Brilliantly funny and entertaining and great examples of a great story told in a few minutes or less.

 

 

It was interesting to see the themes that evolved for the student shorts.  A few little love stories, some with human characters, others with inanimate objects. There is a space wars themes and one or two that relate recycling. We had some interesting discussions about parody and watched a very clever stop motion video, Grocery Store Wars by Free Range Studios. Not sure how much Free Range Studios is still working with Flash, but they have a wonderful archive of work that I love to show the students. They are extremely clever with high production values.

Veronica is definitely one of the most skillful artists in the group.

Looking forward to Week 2. The students will "finish" these projects and we'll talk about interactivity and start working on the iPads.