Tricia Fuglestad's Blog

Try Your Best Growth Mindset Fugleflick

2/14/2018

Fifth Grade Fugleflick Filmmakers spent 2 months creating a story to an original song to encourage everyone to shift their thinking from can't to can. Change that little voice in your head from fixed thinking to a growth mindset and TRY YOUR BEST!

Try Your Best (full version) from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Special FXs Explained:

This movie is full of special effects made with drawn animation and/or green screen. Students used relative size to become the small voice in your head saying positive things to encourage you to TRY YOUR BEST. Here are some of the FX students used.

This little sprite popped onto the TV screen to encourage a student making art. He first had to be layered onto a screenshot of an iPad. Then the artist had to be filmed looking at a TV with the color green on it's screen. The two were layered in the GS app by Do Ink.

Some of the effects students used in this movie have been done before in previous Fugleflicks or projects. The thought bubble trick is explained in this post.

This effect is a straight forward use of relative size to make the sprites look very small. See this post about relative size for a tutorial and more ideas for using this trick.

I'm so excited to see the silhouette special FX in this Fugleflick. This idea has its own post explaining how we found this trick on accident and some of the amazing ideas you can use it for.

For one scene, a student is drawing and gets frustrated. She slams down her marker and gives up. As the art heads to the garbage can, the portrait on it speaks out to its artist begging for her to not give up. This special FX was create after a series of steps as show in the video. The animation was created through rotoscope. See this post to learn more.

This effect where a student spins into a painting with a quick size change was so amazing that it received it's own blog post here.

To make these little sprites fly, we had them pose in the last moment of their video. Then we used a still image of the last frame of the video and made them fly using the keynote app. To enhance the magic, we used a pixie title effect without words (just typed a space) to create a trail of sprite dust as they fly off the screen.

Want to learn the song?

#GSVFF Entry

Students wanted to tell the story of a fixed mindset changing to a growth mindset with the encouragement of positive little voices to combat the negative little voices you hear in your own head. Many students need this message so the filmmakers tried to get in their shoes (and heads) to help others Try their Best.

Since this video fits the theme "In Another's Shoes" we trimmed it down to 2 minutes so it could qualify for the first annual Global Student Voice Film Festival. To take a 3 min 40 sec song down to 2 minutes wasn't easy. The best way was to trim each chorus and remove the bridge. We were allowed another 1 minute of credits. I think it still tells the story just as well though some awesome scenes were removed in this version.

Try Your Best (2 min version) from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Public Screenings of Try Your Best

Try Your Best has been selected for a public screening in the Screen Test Jr Film Festival in Schaumburg on Saturday, April 21st alongside films from Arizona, Texas, Sweden, and Canada. Those who could not attend will skype in to talk about their films.

Photo of screening from last year's Fugleflick, Don't Crush My Dreams

Thursday, May 3, 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm the Arlington Heights Memorial Library will kick off the School District 25 month-long art show with an arts reception. The evening will feature more than 300 works of art from students at District 25 schools, kindergarten through eighth grade, and live music from the South Middle School Jazz Ensemble. Refreshments will be served. There will be a continuous screening of TRY YOUR BEST in the technology room off the Marketplace area.

ScreenTest Jr.

Our Fugleflick Filmmakers' movie, Try Your Best was accepted into the 2018 Screen Test Film Fest Jr. Of the 5 movies screening, ours was the only one local. The other films were from Texas, Arizona, Canada, and Sweden. The hand drawn animation from an 8th grader in Arizona won best of show. See the list of films here.

Just returned from watching #TryYourBest on the big screen at @screen_test Where my #fugleflick filmmakers were celebrated for their amazing #growthmindset movie
Watch it here: https://t.co/zXcrf60bu1 #drydenrocks #d25itspersonal #STEAM #studentvoice #edtech @DoInkTweets pic.twitter.com/n46a6oznta
— Tricia Fuglestad ☕️ (@fuglefun) April 21, 2018

Loved how @screen_test had students discuss their movie-making process with the audience. Here are the #fugleflick filmmakers talking about loving #greenscreen FXs for storytelling: #greenscreenbookslowchat #STEAM #edtech #drydenrocks #tlap @doinktweets https://t.co/zXcrf60bu1 pic.twitter.com/2U2AcoBKw7
— Tricia Fuglestad ☕️ (@fuglefun) April 21, 2018

They also had a chance to explain the role that our storyboard played in making the #fugleflick #TryYourBest #drydenrocks #STEAM pic.twitter.com/DMn6EFOLEh
— Tricia Fuglestad ☕️ (@fuglefun) April 21, 2018

Love that they remembered to mention the audience they created the story for...All the students who need encouragement--> This is for you #TryYourBest https://t.co/zXcrf60bu1 pic.twitter.com/f9lrCiRc6X
— Tricia Fuglestad ☕️ (@fuglefun) April 21, 2018

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Connecting with Celeste

11/6/2017

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Our district is embarking on a ONE BOOK ONE SCHOOL event where every student reads (or is read to) the story, A Nest for Celeste by Henry Cole. Here are some ideas I thought of for connecting with the story through art, animation, and character counts.

Draw Celeste

Below is a handout I created to help students see the shapes in Celeste's form to help you draw. The original illustration by Henry Cole is a value drawing. The pencil strokes become the texture of the fur. He shows highlights and shadows by adding more or less graphite from the pencil. This technique looks more 3-D than just filling in the drawing.

Drawing Celeste with Henry Cole from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Fly with Lafayette the Osprey

Lafayette and Celeste's Basket

1. Fly using green screen video masked into a still image over a video of clouds

2. Digitally layer in a still photo into the basket and create an animation path in Do Ink.

Illustration by Henry Cole

Redrawn in Do Ink Animation App

Be as kind-hearted as an osprey

As Small as a Mouse

Use Brushes Redux to draw over a photo of a small space in the room. Then enter the space with the Do Ink green screen app. Play with relative size by becoming as small as a mouse (framed mice portraits optional).

When you draw this little space you need to take a close up photo. You can change details and simplify the picture if you want. I made the background a flat wall and pretended the items on the table cast a shadow on the wall. I also made the wood grain very simple to help keep the space from becoming complicated.

Resources

Henry Cole wrote and illustrated A Nest for Celeste. He was able to tell us with words and pictures about the characters, setting, and all the elements of the story. See this Fugleflick about the importance of Illustrations.

Allow us to Illustrate from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Click the image to view the book trailer for A Nest for Celeste

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Playing with Relative Size

9/14/2017

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Relative Size refers to clues in the picture that help you figure out the size of objects.

Playing with relative size forces the viewer to imagine something much bigger or much smaller than seemingly possible.
Below is a drawing of a fireplace mantel. It has a candle and picture frames. You would imagine that the objects are only about 8"-12" high. Now when you place a human on the mantel that confuses the scene. Either the mantel is much bigger than you thought or the human is a small as a mouse.

Below is a drawing of a building in Arlington Heights. You can tell from the size of the sidewalk and umbrella tables compared to the building that it's probably over 10 stories tall. Now when we add a human into the picture as tall as the building it makes you wonder if the building is much smaller or the human is monstrously big.

Can you tell in this animation that something extra had to happen to make it convincing that the human was interacting with the building? I'll explain below.

How did you do that?

The green screen app by Do Ink allows you to layer video over or under an image. You can record in real time using the camera mode or do what I did above. I recorded the student in front of green screen first which allowed them to crop, resize, and find the best placement over their drawing to create the illusion that they are as small as a mouse according to relative size.

To make it look like the human can stand behind the building and in front of the sky we had to import the scene twice. You'll see on my screenshot above that I sandwiched the green screen footage between duplicate images. Then, I erased the background from the top image using the masking tools in the app. Here is what it might have looked like if you were just viewing it alone. I can do this trick in the superimpose app as well and then import it, but it's not necessary since the Green Screen app has all the tools for erasing too.

Tutorial for Relative Size in Green Screen App by Do Ink from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Playing with relative size resources:

Take a look at this commercial. It's fun to see the inflatable gorilla set loose in the city. Does it's size seem to change when you compare it to the relative size of the objects around it?

This clip from the Disney adaptation of the book, BFG (Big Friendly Giant) makes everyone feel as small as a mouse when you see the world from the point of view of BFG.

A group of 4th graders used their profile drawings and green screen videos of 1st graders to play with relative size. We called this movie, Little Buddies. See this post for more info.

Another way to demonstrate that students understand relative size is using animation to show size change from foreground (bigger) to background (smaller) along with the other aspects of creating the illusion of depth. See this lesson for more info.