press play print

Years ago, as part of a local Girlfest celebration in Honolulu, I attended a presentation by stop-motion artist Emily Hubley (http://www.emilyhubley.com/).  Many of you may recognize the animations she created for now the cult-classic movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  The concept of adding time and motion to my traditional prints and drawings became irresistible, and I purchased my first portable light table with every intention of immediately creating my own animations. 

Since that moment of inspiration, animation and video have influenced the work of both my fiancé Rob Molyneux and myself.  For his thesis work in grad school, Rob created three-minute long digital video loops of natural occurrences that were translated from original video to frame-by-frame Xeroxes and then printed via lithographic gum transfer before being transposed back into video.

Now, as a 2D, photo, & digital imaging teacher myself, I have been working on projects that utilize stop motion animation in the hope that my students will find this type of work as inspiring and motivational as I have.

For a three-day workshop at the Contemporary Museum, Rob and I had students create identification flipbooks using a series of twelve 4”x7” cards. Following our walk through the gallery, we handed out three cards and a maximum of four colored pencils to each student (a limited color pallet would prove useful later), instructing them to draw an image on each card, one depicting their personal symbol (made up or preexisting), an animal whose characteristics they shared or that embodied characteristics they would like to have, and their alter ego, respectively.  The alter ego could be a superhero with powers the kids desired, demonstrate skills they would like to showcase, embody a future career, or a include a combination of these.

After kids finished these initial drawings, we handed out nine additional cards and showed them our demo flipbooks.  We discussed the process of metamorphosis and talked about how to change their 1^st image into their 2^nd, 2^nd into their 3^rd, and 3^rd back into their 1^st slowly through a sequence of three cards between each pair.  We encouraged kids to do their metamorphosis in pencil line work first and add colors later.  We demonstrated three options for metamorphosis: 1) shape morphing (images slowly shift in shape & placement into the next image), 2) shape explosion (images explode into their major shape components & are reassembled as the next image), and 3) storyline (images morph but more through a logical story, (e.g. zoom in on an image of the earth to find the animal image). 

In my past experience, this has been a difficult lesson for young ones to grasp; however, I believe the availability of multiple visual examples, slowly flipping from image to image while simultaneously asking questions and explaining how the image is changing, limiting the color scheme (less metamorphosis with color), and working with a smaller class size helped even the youngest students achieve success.  At the end of the class, I photographed each image before we taught students how to bind their cards into a book and trim a corner for easier flipping with their thumbs.  I then edited these images into digital video loops and placed them all on a dvd, one for each participant. I even added a looped sample of each artist’s chosen song for the artwork to the final videos. Students were very enthusiastic about learning this type of stop-animation, because it introduced a new way of thinking about two-dimensional imagery by adding the element of change over the dimension of time.  This was a low-tech way of introducing the artistic media of animation and video to a young audience (Instructors' work above, & student work below).