Look at the Potential for the Exponential!

09/04/2012

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listen to ‘Potential for the Exponential’ on Audioboo
UPDATE: NEW SONG RECORDED TO INSPIRE YOU TO VOTE:) 
As many of you may already know, Dryden has a project, Rotoscope Animation on iPads, in the running for $15,000 on the McGraw-Hill STEMie Awards. That would buy a lot of iPad for our students! Please help us with your vote. You have to login first with an email then vote. That's all! Thanks so much to all the Tweeple that have been helping to spread the word! See below:
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We're Finalists and We Need Your Vote!

08/15/2012

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Last Spring Dryden's 5th graders created a collaborative rotoscoped animation on the iPads. It turned out to be so cool that we documented the process and entered it into the McGraw-Hill STEMie Award contest as a Technology and Art project.

Out of the 158 video projects submitted from across the country, they chose 30 finalists. Our Rotoscope Animation on iPads project is one of these finalists. 
The next step is a voting round. 30% of our score is determined by voting.
We have until noon on Sept. 19th to get as many people as possible to create a login and submit their vote for our movie. You can only vote once, so please spread the word!

As part of the application process I filled out essays, sent out and collected permission slips, and proposed a plan for how we would use the $15,000 first place award if we won.  On this point I wrote that I would like to see the money go towards iPads. 
I know that Dryden has iPads, but the teachers do not. Adding new iPads to our collection means that as the iPads rotate through the grade levels each classroom would still have access to one iPad. The one iPad classroom is still a wonderful thing for engagement, quick research, collaboration, and planning. 
So, all the kids will win if we win this contest! Please vote and pass this on.
Picture
Click on the image to view the video and cast your vote
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Creating on iPads: A Practice Page

08/12/2012

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I'm gearing up for the school year by collecting my resources and making them easily available for anyone who wants to learn some of my tips for how to create on the iPad. There are tons of apps in the app store, but I tried to limit my ideas to only a few so that we can work with what we have on our school iPads while I explore other apps and begin writing grants to get them in the future. (100 ipads=$$ for each app purchase) so I'm trying to keep it simple. Below is a screen shot of the new page I added to my website. Visit it here. There are links leading to resources, videos, tutorials, and files that you can download from your iPad and get started playing right away. 
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Notes from my Rotoscoping on iPads Experience

04/09/2012

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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!
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Rotoscoping Video made on iPads

03/12/2012

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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:
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Can Students Rotoscope using iPads?

11/22/2011

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I have a feeling that the iPads will be a wonderful tool for Rotoscoping. I'm working on a plan to try this with my students. Here is what we plan to do...
1. Create a short video sequence that loops well (that my preference)
2. Convert the video to numbered sequential images (I used MPEG Streamclip)
3. Drop the images into the Dropbox App
4. Assign each student an image from the sequence
5. Import the image into a layer in Brushes app
6. Create a drawing with a uniform protocol defining colors, line size, and strategy) in a layer over image
7. Turn back the finished drawing after deleting the image layer via email with image number as the subject line
8. Collect all images and convert into a video in iMovie or an animated gif using this tool
9. Then tweak your final product to make it eligible for the international Collaborative Student Animation project,  Rotoball 2012
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