Flying Fifth Graders

02/16/2013

Fifth graders brought their iPads to art class for the past couple of weeks to work on a digital figure drawing of themselves flying in their pajamas. This image will be the starting point for a creative writing and illustration lesson that will include animating their figures across a landscape. See the entire gallery of images here.

I created the movie below as I was working on this idea. I am hoping their animations can be pieced together into a video with music giving students a chance to combine their art, music, technology, and storytelling skills into a collaborative project.

Flying Animation Intro from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Did you notice that the figures are all in a similar pose? That is because to help students draw their figures successfully, we imported my sketch of a generic figure as a layer in Sketchbook Express. The artwork was drawn on a separate layer over the sketch and filled with color using the pour feature. The background is empty now so we can erase it using instant alpha in Keynote so we can animate it across their drawn landscapes.

Comments

Steve Clark link

02/16/2013 10:26pm

Love this animation! Thanks for sharing! We have started playing around with DoInk animation and love It. What do you use other than Keynote to animate the flying students? We're these created only using iPads?

Tricia

02/17/2013 10:33am

Hi Steve,
This project was going to be done in Doink with the figure animated over a background (as you see in the video) but I needed more than two sessions with my students to do this.
I only had the iPads with my 5th graders (1:1) for two sessions. So, I had them draw in SketchbookX instead and then we'll design backgrounds in paint or markers, photograph them, and animate in Keynote.
If I have iPads available, I could do the animation in the new DOINK (they are adding a photo option in the next update). Doink Express already has the import photo option, so we could animate in that app or puppet pals allows you to pull in photos for background and foreground too. Those two apps also record audio as you animate which might be fun too. Then, I would have the kids export to quicktime, email them to me, then we can set the movie to music, and piece the small animations into one movie.