This week Apple moved all .Mac customers over to MobielMe, their new cloud computing email service. This coincided with the launch of the new iPhone. I have not been able to retrieve email for four days from the Apple servers. Apple claims only 1% of all users have had service interruption. I’ve been on boards, forums, and chats about this all weekend. I seriously doubt Apple’s loyal fans will forgive them anytime soon. Many many iPhone and .Mac users have been affected.
Since no one at Apple has been able to address my concerns, I’ve decided that sometimes service can be so insanely frustrating, so ineptly and dishonestly deployed, and so vehmently denied by a provider that a user has to make a video for youtube in protest. Here is mine:
Had the opportunity to be the final workshop guest at this year’s Summer Arts Institute at Manhattanville College in NY. (Thanks BIll Gordh!) This intensive course focuses early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school educators on the possibilities inherent to the arts. Educators encounter an in-depth arts experience via a variety of art forms: storytelling, music, creative movement, and the visual arts. Yours truly showed up with a bag of animation tricks to round out the week. But I discovered, with relish, the participants had created Balinese puppets the day before. I knew they were exploring puppet making, but actually seeing what they had created was a dream. The animations below only feature a few, but they all were wonderfully realized. I was jealous I hadn’t been able to make one myself.
I put away what I was going to do, and chose to animate one of the puppets, to demonstrate how to think about motion, in animation terms. Improvising with a puppet which had only one leg and one arm rigged for motion was a challenge. After about ten minutes this is what I rendered. (The audio was created afterwards in iMovie with instruments on hand)
I then had an opportunity to create a second animation with the entire class watching the process.
I broke the entire animation process into three segments:
Anticipation, Action, and Follow Through
Weight Distribution
Overlapping action
With these in mind, and a dragon with only the legs and one arm articulated, we did this:
We had a delightful time. We did all this in less than an hour. Not including the puppet building!!!
Bill was gracious enough to send me one of the feedback comments. It is instructive for all who’d like to try this and bring their creations to life, and more importantly, create an audience online for the performance.
(Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to go into best practices in creating an online audience, but that is an entirely different workshop)
Anyway, here is what one of the educators had to say:
“The highlight of my week was the animation piece, in which our work became animated and put in action. It was exciting to learn how animators work. When I heard of the years that it takes to work on animation, I always questioned why these artists would be willing to work on it for that long. This is no longer the case; I began to love the idea of isolating movements, like we learned in the creative moment class, to create a living and breathing thing. The puppets came alive and developed personalities. I think this is definitely something that can be used in my classroom. I will work on trying to incorporate this building wide next year. I think my school district should make the software available for this process when they realize how powerful the experience of animating can be.”
Bingo. This is just what most people experience when they see how accessible this kind of storytelling can be. Once you pair it up with the unlimited possibilities having to do with creating an audience for your stories online, you move into hyperdrive and find the satisfaction that comes from preforming for an audience of raving fans.
Let me know what you think about these short clips. Can you see this exercise motivating those in your organization to pursue animated storytelling? Even if it is only for a blog?
Recently returned from Rwanda, where amongst other things, we went up a volcano to see the mountain gorillas. Along for the trek was Paula Kahumbu from WildlifeDirect in Kenya, and co-author of the upcoming book, “Looking for Miza” – about a lost baby mountain Gorilla, coming soon from Scholastic and Turtle Pond Productions.
While the rest of us were armed with still and video camera’s, Paula had her audio equipment strapped to her side for podcasting the experience to her faithful blog followers. (I include myself now) She documented our journey via audio as we tromped through the stinging nettle and mud up to the Gorillas. Then as we encountered the Gorillas up-close and personal, there was Paula, microphone outstretched in hand, capturing the cacophonous sounds of the Gorilla habitat for her blog. This is what happens when you have an audience. This is what happens, and we’ve been addressing this for two years now, when you know you can make a difference with your story. I am inspired by her forward thinking, which includes organizing and encouraging many conservation-minded trackers and rangers to start their own blogs and communicate about the issues surrounding this endangered species. Check out her channel here.
She has also done a wonderful post about our animation workshop in Rwanda. Rather than toot our own horn, look at the post Paula has offered. Wonderful!
