Tricia Fuglestad's Blog

School Arts: Rotoscope in a Mutoscope

2/20/2022

Read about our Collaborative Rotoscope Animation Project in School Arts Magazine March 2022

I wrote up the Rotoscope in a Mutoscope collaborative lesson for School Arts Magazine. They put it in their Media Arts issue, March of 2022. You can read the full post here. Since the lesson (literally) has lots of moving parts, I decided to package up the whole lesson in a step by step media filled eBook. This guides the student and/or teacher through every step with tutorials, examples, and any printable handouts from beginning until the end of this project. It's SO worth it! The results are simple magical. View here.

packaged lesson

Read the article

view blog post

UNDO: What if life had an undo button?

1/28/2019

0 Comments

Poster Image for UNDO Fugleflick

A group of 12 5th grade Fugleflick filmmakers created an original musical video demonstrating how wonderful an undo button would be in real life.
They chose to illustrate in magical ways the benefits of an undo button in art room related situations.

0 Comments

Green Screen Workshop with D15

11/22/2018

2 Comments

Click to view my Smore flyer with resources for my Green Screen Lessons

2 Comments

My Garden Veggie Tales

7/27/2018

1 Comment

It's dinner time and the garden vegetables are getting nervous.

This was made in the Do Ink Animation app over my photo.

1 Comment

Patriotic Lip Sync

10/10/2017

0 Comments

4th graders are embarking on a project I've been wanting to try to for a couple of years. We are going to do collaborative lip sync rotoscope animated movies. Each class of 4th grade will make a patriotic movie using their artwork and voice. Together their words or phrases will be edited together to recite the preamble of the constitution, the pledge of allegiance, and the ending of The Colossus poem on the State of Liberty.

1. Assign parts

I went through each of the patriotic themed pieces and broke it into enough "parts" that each student could contribute one word or phrase. I wanted each part to be only 1 second of video if possible. This would keep the number of drawings somewhere between 5-8.

Preamble part one

Preamble part two

Ending of New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

The Pledge of Allegiance

2. Recording

The week before we draw the rotoscope, we record video of each student speaking their part into the camera. I used an iRig microphone to help get better audio. Since audio really counts for this project, I needed to ask all the students for full cooperation. I gave them paper and monster packets to draw from as they waited for their classmates to be recorded.
I set up each video with a tight close up so that students could easily draw their face and the changes in their expression and mouth as they say their word or phrase. I use the iOgrapher tripod mount for my iPad so that I would have steady footage.

3. Prep the footage

I always leave a bit of lead and end time when I film so that no words are cut off. This means that the footage I took of the students needs trimming. After I transfer my files to my desktop (via dropbox or google drive app) I pull up each clip in quicktime, trim, and rename the file to "number_phrase_studentName". This puts all the files in order which will help for future editing.

4. Prep for Rotoscoping

This handout helps students get their video imported into the Do Ink Animation app to the correct layer, add some transparency, get a small frame rate, adjust ghost images (I find them distracting in this project so I turned them off), and set up the brush tool.

Preparing for Rotoscope

5. Contour Line Drawing

Students will be lead through the first drawing so I can share my recommendations for how to draw the features of the face in a simple but accurate way. This contour line drawing lesson will help them get into a good pattern of attention to detail and accuracy.

6. Putting it all together

4-1 and 4-2 The Preamble of the Constitution

Lip Sync Rotoscope of the Preamble to the Constitution from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Lip Sync Rotoscope of The New Colossus from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

4-4 Pledge of Allegiance Lip Sync

Lip Sync Rotoscope of the Pledge of Allegiance from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Resources:

This video introduces the idea of contour line drawings.

Drawing From Experience from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

This Rotoscope video will inspire your students.

Contour line drawing extension:

The students uploaded their favorite single still image from their rotoscope animation to Artsonia. This gallery description lead viewers (parents) to links to their movies. The image was drawn fast and without much art instruction since the focus of our class time was creating a series of drawings to make the rotoscope animation. Eventually, I would like students to spend some time working with their portrait drawing to take it to the next level using Colorscape app. This app will allow them to improve on their drawings and color the art without disturbing the black lines.

Original drawing from rotoscope project

Fixed and colored in Colorscape app

After importing the image I erased and changed black lines to improve artwork

I used an opaque marker to fill base colors and used a transparent brush to add shadows

0 Comments

Practicing Rotoscoping

9/21/2017

1 Comment

Last year my fifth graders made collaborative rotoscope animations that we put into flipbookit.com mutoscopes. It was pretty amazing to see digital art become physical through this fun viewer. See the post with all the how tos here. Below is the display I set up this school year showcasing their flipbookits. I used this display to introduce the concept to my 4th graders.

Click to view this Collaborative Flipbookit Rotoscope Animation Lesson

1 Comment

Dancing Sketchbooks

6/30/2017

3 Comments

..and other Individual Rotoscope Animation Ideas

One of the super cool things about Do Ink Animation and Drawing app is that you can pull in photos or videos and draw over them. Drawing over each frame of a video is a technique called Rotoscope Animation. You probably have seen this technique in the famous music video from the 80's A-Ha's Take Me On. I also LOVE this music video and song by Andrew Huang, Every Night I Dream of Dancing, which is a rotoscope collaboration using 30 artists crowdsourced through the internet.
I tried many ways to instruct my students to create rotoscope animations collaboratively, but I've yet to have them create their own...until now. I think I've come up with some ideas that can make this project manageable for very little people.

3 Comments

Rotoscope in a Retro Mutoscope

5/16/2017

1 Comment

I'm super excited to have found the Flipbookit in my Twitter feed a month or so ago. The discovery came at a time where I was thinking about how to display our class animations as I was preparing for rotoscope animations lesson with my 5th graders. What a perfect solution. The flipbookit is a DIY kit that creates a retro styled mutoscope, an early motion picture hand cracked flipbook device. This box has a crank that spins a rolodex of cards that you can customize through their online tool printed on labels. It took me 1 hour to put the box together and 1/2 hr to print, stick, and load the art. They are too expensive to have each student make their own, but because of their design, they make for a really simple all class rotoscope collaborative project. I'll try to explain.

Click to download the detailed packaged lesson with tutorials, handouts, and examples for this Collaborative Rotoscope Animation project

1 Comment

Low Tech Really Cool Animation

6/10/2015

2 Comments

I was thinking about one of our very first attempts at rotoscoping at Dryden the other day. It was a wonderful way to create an animation collaboration in a low tech way.
We created a 3 second video that would easily loop. So we brainstormed some options and came up with dance moves that can be repeated over and over again.
Here are the steps for how we made this little silhouette gif of a student spinning. It's low tech in that you only need one computer, printer, and scanner. The students do the work on transparencies.

Make a three second video (something easy to loop)
Split the video into an image sequence. You can download MPEG Streamclip to export your video to image sequence.
Use this automator workflow (on a mac) to turn your image sequence into a pdf that you can send to a b/w printer (should be around 35 pages)
Number the pages in order (you will thank me later)
Pass out transparencies, black permanent markers, and a numbered page from the printed pdf to your students
Have students make a silhouette on the transparency over the print out from the video. Be honest about the image even if it is abstract looking or blurry.
Collect, order, & scan the images (use white paper behind transparencies). Number them in the computer.
Use ezgif to select all the images and make them into a gif.
Celebrate your super cool collaboration!

screenshot of all the images in sequence ready to be made into a gif

Want a high tech option?

We now have a class set of iPads available so I designed a lesson to try an iPad Rotoscope Animation collaboration. It's the same idea but no need for transparencies, scanning, or printing. Everything is organized and created digitally. Explore it here.

2 Comments

Creative Projects to turn Stem to STEAM

6/23/2014

4 Comments

I have done a presentation called Creative Digital Projects that turn Stem to STEAM at three conferences over the past couple of years. These 45-50 minute presentations include a bizillion ideas in a media packed keynote file that I have trouble sharing online. However I did create a condensed version of the presentation for the AOE Online Conference last summer. The presentation has been behind a pay wall for one year and can finally come out for public consumption now. The following lessons are shared in the video below. Learn more from my links. Also, see Wes Fryer's review of my live presentation at the Illinois Computer Educator's Conference here.