provide a couple of sketches to deter-mine the look of their animation. 4. Build Build is the making of a prototype from your design. In animation and film, you make a storyboard—your animation in sketch form. Here, every important frame of the animation exists on paper. Camera angles and compositions are fully developed. 5. Evaluate Evaluate is where we look at what we’ve built, test it, and assess it. At this point, students have not even shot their animations, but by evaluat-ing early on, we take better advantage of the feedback. 6. Refine Refine is where you respond to feed-back. Depending on the feedback, you may be tweaking your storyboard or shooting your images. While time-consuming, shooting the photographs that make up your animation is easy. Design Thinking is a problem-solving strateg ften used b designers in both the arts and engineering fields. Just make sure you’re shooting enough images for your desired frame rate. But, this process isn’t linear. We are now in the iterative design cycle, spiraling from Refine to Design and back again. The key is to not treat your ideas or art as precious. We build it, break it, and come up with something new as many times as necessary to come up with an elegant solution to our problem. Once our storyboard and photographs match what we want, we animate. There’s nothing to this—just arrange the photos in order, set your frame rate, and push Animate! Selected frames from Mind Games , a stop-motion animation from student Max Johnson. To view the full video, visit youtu.be/-oFzWTdWKlY. tions into contests, have them play on your school’s webpage. Let your students’ hard work shine! Andrew D. Watson is fine arts instruc-tional specialist for Alexandria City Public Schools in Alexandria, Virginia, and co-editor for this issue of SchoolArts . andrew.watson@acps.k12.va.us NATIONAL STANDARD Producing: Develop and refine artistic techniques and work for presentation. WEB LINK 7. Share This step is often overlooked, but what’s the point of the process with-out at least looking at the product? Host a film festival, enter the anima-www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9el MhScIzKjFIup07YUuWgStNAcuCgJv SCHOOLARTSMAGAZINE.COM 31
School Arts Magazine JAN 2019: Page 35
