Using AI To Animate Drawings

I came upon this site via ETMOOC2 and wondered about it’s potential for play in the classroom. It’s called Animated Drawings and is fueled by an AI engine via Meta (uh oh). It’s very simple to use: upload a drawing, and follow the steps, and get your drawing put into small bits of motion — dancing, walking, jumping, etc.

I did two experiments. One with a large face with small body and one with a saxophone body. I tried one with a starfish drawing but it just didn’t work. It was really weird.

Peace (and Motion),
Kevin

Visual Poem Remix: Miles (by Mike Sheffield Brown)

In the Open Write space yesterday, another writer/poet shared a poem of a colleague about Miles Davis, since I was writing mine about Dave Brubeck, and I really enjoyed the prose poem from Mike Sheffield Brown in a journal called Still Life 2020.

I took the liberty of a visual remix — a sort of listening riff to his poem —  by first turning his poem into the bell of a trumpet with some odd apps I have that break apart an image (I had a screenshot of his poem), and then layering in some animated musical notes into the image. I wish I could have added as little Miles music underneath but use your imagination.

Here is the song that Mike references in his piece, the first Miles Davis he heard as a teenager that blew him away as he listened to the vinyl album he borrowed from the city library in his empty house and was transported into something completely different.

I found Mike’s email and wrote him about what I had, sharing my appreciation for his words. I’ll see if he writes back.

Peace (listening in),
Kevin

For Virtual Field Day: Making Stopmotion Movies

Our elementary school is taking a break from academics this week (we have three weeks to go until the end of the year) and doing all sorts of Wellness/Health/Arts activities. I think families, kids and teachers all needed a little mental health reprieve, a quick breather before the rush of the end of this strange school year is upon us.

Since we can’t have our usual Field Day of group activities throughout our school grounds, the specialist teachers designed a Virtual Field Day project, and invited classroom teachers to submit videos as inspiration to be active and creative for families. I decided to invite kids to make stop-motion movies, and made the video above as my way to introduce and invite movie making to happen.

Peace (frame by frame by frame),
Kevin

A SmallPoem for Small Poems

I’m tinkering around with a visual typography app that Terry and Wendy shared out called TypiVideo. I like the effects of the moving text but I am having trouble with finding the ways that I can set animation and text (I know the controls are there, and I saw a tutorial that indicated where and how I can do more, but I can’t seem to have get to them to work on mine. Might need to reload the app.)

Anyway, the poem above is for another poetry venture elsewhere.

Peace (animated),
Kevin

Sprucing Up the Stopmotion Movie Site

Making Stopmotion Movies in the Classroom

I realized that my website resource for making Stopmotion Movies had a bunch of dead links and dead videos, so I spent some time this week making sure links worked and that old resources were replaced with new ones, etc.

Check out the Making Stopmotion Movies site. Use it and share it as you like.

As I note on the homepage …

Making movies encourages:

* Project-based learning
* Creativity
* Collaboration
* Story development skills
* Character development skills
* Presentation/Publication experience
* Technology expertise

And here are some links within the site:

We’re exploring animation and gif creation in CLMOOC this week. Come join us for a Twitter Chat today at 1 p.m. EST with the #clmooc hashtag.

Peace (beyond the camera click),
Kevin

Imagination, Animation, and Education

We had a rich discussion yesterday at the Make with Me Hangout for Connected Learning MOOC (CLMOOC) on the issue of animation and gifs, exploring the notions of learning, explaining and pop culture integration with video loops.

Since it was a Make with Me, I worked on shooting this short stopmotion piece in the midst of the session, using a Google Chrome add-on app called StopMotion Animator (which I learned about via Richard Byrne’s Free Tech for Teachers). I had made my little creature with WikiStix and then converted my video file (from the app) into a gif with an online conversion site.

Here is the full Make with Me, with Sarah, Niall, Terry E., Terry G. and Clare.

Later, I used another Chrome add-one to make gifs of each participant for sharing on Twitter, which Sheri apparently pulled into one larger gif.

 

The question we were considering, why gif and why animation? played out a few ways as Sarah led us in discussion. Niall talked about how using animations in science classes allows for a visual way to teach complex topics (and allowing students to make animations of a science concept would demonstrate learning).

Clare talked about using animation with Lego Avatars with medical students, as an alternative way to spark discussion about reflection of practice. Terry G. and Terry E. both talked about the aspects of fun and being creative with various tools, using short video to make a point or to tap into pop culture. I shared how often I find myself, and my students, “breaking” the technology in order to make it do things it was not necessarily designed to do.

And there’s more in there …

We have a Twitter Chat planned for tomorrow (Thurs) on animation and gifs, so come join the conversation with the #clmooc hashtag. It all starts at 1 p.m. EST

Peace (in forward motion),
Kevin

Small Moving Parts: Gifs and Animation

We’re exploring the use of GIFs and animations (including stopmotion) in the Connected Learning MOOC (CLMOOC) this week. If you’ve been wondering how to create small animations, and what the value might be for both creativity and learning as well as the connections to popular culture, come join us during this Make Cycle.

GIF skeptic

There are lots of resources in the post for this CLMOOC Make Cycle and folks will be sharing out work and ideas all week long. We have a Make with Me Hangout tomorrow — Tuesday 1 p.m. EST — and a Twitter Chat — Thursday 1 p.m. EST.

One early share for me is a simple animation, using paper cards (or the corner of a small notebook). We used to make these in school in our books (don’t tell the teacher). It’s a Flip Book, animated by the simple flipping of pages. I made this one a few years ago during a Claymation/Stopmotion Movie Camp that I facilitated, and we had kids make them. It was a lot of fun.

I also created a website resource some years back (and which I try to update as much as possible) for teachers wondering about stopmotion animation movies in the classroom. I used it for workshops and as a clearinghouse for remembering resources for myself.

Making Stopmotion Movies in the Classroom

Check out Making Stopmotion Movies

See what you can make …

Peace (moves along),
Kevin

Slice of Life (Day 30): Making Quidditch Animations

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write all through March, every day, about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

We do all sorts of celebrating for our school’s Quidditch season, which comes to a close TODAY with a day-long tournament for our sixth graders and then a students vs. teachers match this evening. I am tired just thinking about it. But it will be a lot of fun. Noisy fun. Exhausting fun. You get the idea.

Among the many classroom activities surrounding Quidditch, which includes various writing pieces such as diagramming plays and using expository writing to explain the plays, I show my students the basics of stopmotion animation using a site called ParaPara Animation (click the yellow wrench in the bottom right corner to get started). It’s simple to use, and a little quirky and a bit buggy, but the students love it. We had them making animations to celebrate Quidditch, and their teams.

Here are a few:

Peace (catch it),
Kevin