At Summer Art Blast 2010 in Mobile, a Creative Collage class for eight- to sixteen-year-olds ended its session with something more ambitious than refrigerator art: student-made stop-motion animations.
The class was led by instructor Zach DePolo with special guest Ryan Jetten. Campers spent their days altering discarded books, building miniature sets, folding origami and mixing traditional collage techniques with whatever odds and ends and glue they could gather.
A Thousand Pictures at a Time
The twist came when students brought their collages to life through stop-motion animation. Working with a simple digital camera — and roughly a thousand frames apiece — each camper or group produced their own animated short built from the artwork they had created.
The project showed how local arts education was stretching beyond drawing and painting in 2010, giving Mobile kids hands-on experience with filmmaking tools most adults were only beginning to explore.