When I was alerted to the BLICK Art Matters Video contest I thought that this would be the perfect time to not only reflect on my artistic journey and the role art education has played in my life, but also a time for me to try to make a movie on my iPad using the Explain Everything app. I'll "explain everything" about this process after you take a peek at the results. Voting begins July 1st at this Facebook link: http://bit.ly/120GgJG
More of my story about why art education matters:
I didn't have an elementary art teacher growing up and I was craving artistic opportunities. I would spend more time on drawing my book report cover than writing my report. I entered every art and coloring contest I saw. Every birthday & Christmas I asked for art supplies and sketchbooks. I drew ALL the time and tried to teach myself the best I could to improve. When I entered high school and saw the list of classes I could take I acted like a starved ravenous wolf and absolutely devoured every fine arts class they offered from visual art to creative writing to drama.
I was late in developing my skills and worked really hard at catching up to my peers. I was too late to compete with the musicians or actors. I didn't have any stage experience and all the confidence that comes from early exposure. Art was my lifeline, my passion, and my identity. I was the student who needed to demonstrate learning through drama, multi-media presentations, a song, a drawing, a dance, or a poem. I wasn't offered choices like those until grad school.
Being an art teacher is my art form now. My students are my clay. Their souls are my canvas. I celebrate their accomplishments as my own. I want to give to them what I always wanted for myself: an elementary art education.
I didn't have an elementary art teacher growing up and I was craving artistic opportunities. I would spend more time on drawing my book report cover than writing my report. I entered every art and coloring contest I saw. Every birthday & Christmas I asked for art supplies and sketchbooks. I drew ALL the time and tried to teach myself the best I could to improve. When I entered high school and saw the list of classes I could take I acted like a starved ravenous wolf and absolutely devoured every fine arts class they offered from visual art to creative writing to drama.
I was late in developing my skills and worked really hard at catching up to my peers. I was too late to compete with the musicians or actors. I didn't have any stage experience and all the confidence that comes from early exposure. Art was my lifeline, my passion, and my identity. I was the student who needed to demonstrate learning through drama, multi-media presentations, a song, a drawing, a dance, or a poem. I wasn't offered choices like those until grad school.
Being an art teacher is my art form now. My students are my clay. Their souls are my canvas. I celebrate their accomplishments as my own. I want to give to them what I always wanted for myself: an elementary art education.
Meet the cast:
 Patty (my nickname when I was little) |  Mrs. Fuglestad (me) the Art Teacher |
 Scenery: Drawing based on my art room |  Prop: A worksheet; the closest thing I had to an art project. |
The Process:
1. Draw the characters, scene, and prop(s) using a drawing app like Procreate, Brushes, or Sketchbook Express that allows you to save to the camera role with a transparent background (PNG) so you could easily overlap and layer the objects in the animation.
2. Set up your Explain Everything slides as "shots" in a storyboard. Every time you want the characters to have different scenery it should be on a new slide. I loaded up each slide with scenery and characters ahead of time. I drew in the brown table with a shape on the slide where we see the apple sheet. Then I duplicated the slide, zoomed in the objects, and made it a close up. I chose to use Explain Everything rather than Puppet Pals because I knew that I would be drawing in the video (can't do that in Puppet Pals). You can't move your characters on and off the stage in Explain Everything (which you can do in Puppet Pals), but I didn't need to.
3. I hit record and spoke my story while moving my characters a bit to "act" it out. I hit the advance slide button and continued on. It recorded one continuous story that I could edit or record over in part or completely in the app.
4. I exported the movie straight to dropbox (because I'm running out of room on my iPad-ugh!) and imported the file into iMovie.
5. In iMovie, I decided to clean up the audio, trim some scenes down, add a nice transition, set it to music, and add a title at the end because I wanted to enter it into a contest. But, if I wasn't being picky, it was a fine movie straight from the app.
1. Draw the characters, scene, and prop(s) using a drawing app like Procreate, Brushes, or Sketchbook Express that allows you to save to the camera role with a transparent background (PNG) so you could easily overlap and layer the objects in the animation.
2. Set up your Explain Everything slides as "shots" in a storyboard. Every time you want the characters to have different scenery it should be on a new slide. I loaded up each slide with scenery and characters ahead of time. I drew in the brown table with a shape on the slide where we see the apple sheet. Then I duplicated the slide, zoomed in the objects, and made it a close up. I chose to use Explain Everything rather than Puppet Pals because I knew that I would be drawing in the video (can't do that in Puppet Pals). You can't move your characters on and off the stage in Explain Everything (which you can do in Puppet Pals), but I didn't need to.
3. I hit record and spoke my story while moving my characters a bit to "act" it out. I hit the advance slide button and continued on. It recorded one continuous story that I could edit or record over in part or completely in the app.
4. I exported the movie straight to dropbox (because I'm running out of room on my iPad-ugh!) and imported the file into iMovie.
5. In iMovie, I decided to clean up the audio, trim some scenes down, add a nice transition, set it to music, and add a title at the end because I wanted to enter it into a contest. But, if I wasn't being picky, it was a fine movie straight from the app.
A screenshot of my slides in Explain Everything
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