A frame from The Adventures of Billy, Mike & Junior, a cut-out animation created by Ana, Aida, Maria Fernada and Ana Martha in one of my high school animation workshops this week.

I haven't been able to do much Bear Town work over the past week and a half because I was preparing and teaching a workshop for high school students on cut-out animation. It was a lot of work, but I think the 65 students I taught over three days this week really enjoyed it. Each day I explained the stop motion animation process, screened some documentaries about the making of recent stop motion films (Corpse Bride and the recent Dragon Superbowl commercial for United Airlines) and then divided the students up in to groups of five to make short cut out films inspired by Michel Gagne's Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets and The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.

Here's a couple of the films that the students created (sorry for the .wmv files, we were working with Windows Moviemaker at the school):

• "The Descent" (358 KB .wmv)
• "The Guy" (195 KB .wmv)

I went back to the school on Friday to drop off a VCD of all the finished animation and several of the students came up to me asking questions about web sites where they could learn more about animation or where to buy supplies to make their own cut-out films. A few parents told me their children had come home after doing the workshop and started experimenting on their own with web cams and copies of Windows Moviemaker, which was really rewarding to hear.

I'm going to be away for most of the next week or so, but after that I'm planning to get back in to doing some serious puppet building work for Bear Town.

Posted by Andrew at 4:01 PM | Permalink

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