In our summer workshops, the students were introduced to various methods of animation. One technique they found really interesting and exciting was Rotoscoping, where animators trace over live action, film movement. Inspired by the “PG” portions of Richard Linklater's, “Waking Life” which we selectively watched, the children began to come up with some fresh ideas of their own. We had limited editing tools and didn’t have a rotoscoping software available to us to make an entire video using this technique. But, because the kids really loved the "look" of rotoscoping, as a group, we came up with the idea of manually painting photographs to introduce and accompany the student’s live interview clips. The students painted their own photographed portraits as stills to add to their video documentary titled, “Why I like Being a Kid.”
The portraits were scanned and added to the video during editing. Therefore, there was no actual animation in the documentary, but it sure turned out visually and innovatively, interesting! This is Kassidy one of my 5th grade students. She painted over this photograph of herself. In her live video clip she says, “ I like being a Kid because I can still have fun and I don’t have to worry about breaking up with boys.” I thought that testimonial was priceless! Nice Job Kassidy!