I was asked today by Melissa, art teacher in a Cincinnati Jr. High, to relay my experience rotoscoping with my 5th graders on iPads.
I had mapped out a plan a long while back as to how I was going to approach this lesson and found that I did made some modifications along the way.

1. Students created a short video (Learned that adding transitions like fading out doesn't translate well when student did a contour line drawing-skip that next time)
2. Convert the video to jpgs (try using MPEG Stream Clip (free download) Here is my  screencast showing you how to do this.
3. Dropped the images into Dropbox (They were all 001-335 already so everything was in order)
4. Assigning images to students (I was taking too much time with this process. I should have just written the image numbers on tickets and have a bucket for them to grab from. Then later when I needed to reject an image, which I did many times on my quality control checks, I would just put the number back into the bucket)
5. Import into layer in Brushes (yes----but they draw in a layer over the photo then hide the photo under the white layer before the turn it in. If they followed directions then it worked. If they drew on the photo layer. they wasted their class time. UGH!)
6. Uniform protocol (We all chose solid black lines size 3, full opacity and decided how to deal with difficult parts of the video together)
7. Turned back the art via email (They wrote their name and image number under the drawing in digital ink in Brushes and used the Subject line of the email to tell me again their name and image number) 
8.Collect the images (I grabbed the images from email and renamed them by number and artist ie, "007jessica" Everything neatly stacked up in the folder. So I dropped them all into imovie with .2sec no effects and made the movie. It was too slow at first. So I exported it-reimported it and used the speed adjustments to make it faster. I tried gifninja to make an animation of some in-progress images.
9. Tweak and turn in (we were able to submit it to Rotoball 12 after we cropped it to 15 seconds and added the ball in and ball out as required)

For more information see the post that has all the links for this project here.
Below is our amazing collaborative ipad generated original Rotoscoped animation by 5th graders!
Add Comment
 
 
Picture
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote for Declan17  to win Artist of the Week through Artsonia. I heard that 5th graders showed tons of support for Declan and shared their support via Edmodo. Here is a screenshot from Miss Feck. They randomly choose artwork uploaded to their site each week and ask art appreciators to cast their votes for the winning art. Declan had more votes than anyone in his age category! Yeah! So he will be receiving a plaque, a $50gift card from Blick Art, and his artwork posted on the winners page on Artsonia. The art room will also received a $1oo gift certificate for art supplies as well. His art was one of 335 images that helped create an all 5th grade rotoscope animation made on iPads. Take a look at the final animation below. This will be submitted to Rotoball12, the international collaborative animation projected hosted by David Gran in Shanghai, China. Learn more here.
Add Comment
 
 
My fifth graders did it! Teaching art projects on iPads is unchartered territory for me so every success is a huge piece of news for Dryden's art program. The latest success is an all grade-level collaborative animation project on the iPads using the technique of rotoscoping.
Here is my first blog post stating my plan for this rotoscoping lesson.
Here is the blog post showing our movie that we planned to animate.
Here is the blog post showing the amazing thing that happened when we began this project.
Here is our final movie below:
1 Comment
 
 
I grabbed my video camera to show you this AMAZING occurrence in the art room. When students learned how to rotoscope on the ipad this is what it looked (and sounded) like.
Years ago we tried a rotoscope project with a very motivated small group of third graders. They created an animation, divided it up into still frames, drew a contour line drawings over each frame, and deleted the photos. We used FLASH software and the interactive board to draw. The process took 3 months of 15 minute recesses. But the results are amazing!! It's hard to believe that 8 / 9 year olds made the rotoscoped video below:
UPDATE!!! 
Today a bunch of images were finished and turned in to me via email. I started sequencing them and saw the animation forming. Here is our sneak peak of what's to come! Isn't this going to be cool? If it isn's animating for you below, than use this link to view it online
at gifninja.com
Add Comment
 
 
My fifth graders came to art for their first day of Rotoscoping on their iPads. They plan to turn their little movie into an animation created by line drawings over each of the 300 or so still frames of this video (see at bottom of this post). As I watched them draw using our new styluses on the class set of iPads I captured an MC Escher moment where a hand draws a hand, but this time digitally. We hope that all 100 5th graders will each create three drawings that will all be combined into one digital animation. If it works out, we hope to enter it in Rotoball 2012.
Here is the animation video that they are planning to rotoscope. They designed it to loop over and over again so the 15 second animation could run endlessly.
Add Comment