Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Stop motion comes to life!






We continued last week building our sets for our films. Ms Kim had a sore throat and couldn't speak much, but the students did really well listening and communicating non-verbally. Most of the class worked diligently to finish their props or to start building new sets, but one team (the city team) finished with theirs and began filming. Using clay figures and ingenuity, the girls wrote a storyline with a wedding and a reception that gets crashed by aliens! The groom got abducted... this week we hope to find out what happened to him, and also see what's happening over at our park, tent, church, and stage sets!

Sunday, April 18, 2010

More Filmmaking!

Our class continued to build sets for our films this week. One team worked on a city backdrop, including hotels made of brownie boxes and houses made from cut cardboard. Another team worked on a park for the same movie. Using play dough and clay, some students put together characters and items for the sets. The park has a fountain, benches and trash cans. Other students used tempura paint to make the backdrops colorful. The classroom at the end of the day showed the remnants of lots of creativity from the day; lots of pipe cleaners, foam pieces, cardboard, and paint splatters were strewn across the room! The students did a good job helping to clean-up, and we ended up getting to film one of the sets. Next week, we are looking forward to putting the finishing touches on the project and filming our movies!

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Introduction to Stop Motion





On Friday Mr. Justin and Ms. Kim introduced the students to the concept of a stop motion film. We talked about how movies are made of lots and lots of still pictures, kind of like a flip book. Then we broke into two teams and started a competition to see who could come up with the best stop motion film. Mr. Justin's team went outside and started making a stop motion film with their bodies. They had to stay still and just move a little bit at a time to make the movie come out right. It is a work in progress, but the work looks promising! Ms. Kim's group took a different approach. They decided to build the props for their movie first and film on a smaller scale. They decided the setting of their movie would be a city and a park, and the event would be a block party for some holiday. Ms. Kim voted for Earth Day, since we get to celebrate it together next week, but the kids were more in favor of Easter or Halloween. Since they didn't have any supplies, Ms. Kim led them on a field trip around the school stopping at all the recycling bins and looking for treasures. We found great stuff! There were enough smaller boxes to start making a car and a hotel and other buildings, and one large box to start a park. We built trees and a swing set out of pipe cleaners. It looks awesome and we can't wait to keep working on the project next week.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

This week in artSpace we announced our field trip! Our class will be going to visit ASU on May 7th and explore the campus and various arts activities. We are so excited! To prepare for the trip to a university, we discussed where we would all be in 10 years. Some students want to be singers or performers, others visual artists, and others sports players. Then we painted with tempura paints on poster board who, what, and/or where we want to be in 10 years. The posters came out looking great!

Easter Art

On Thursday before Easter, the students used foam sheets to make stamps in different Easter themed shapes and colors! Foam printing is a process where you take a dull pencil or other similar object and create a drawing or pattern in on Styrofoam. You can use printing foam or just regular picnic plates and bowls! When the drawing is finished, you color ink on the pattern and then stamp it on to paper. We all learned a lesson in innovation and problem solving, because it turns out that Crayola washable markers don't work so well as ink for foam stamps. The students suggested watercolor paints and then tempura paints. Both sort of worked, but watercolor produced a blurry, abstract form and tempura paints had a tendency to smear. However, we all worked hard at trying to make something work in the spirit of Easter. We worked so hard that Mr. Justin and Ms. Kim forgot to take pictures of our finished projects!