A Little Bit of Imagination and a Whole Lot of Teamwork

Art In Motion

*ARPCHS Students watch the premiere of their stop-motion animation videos with rapt attention.*

For two years, CAW has partnered with A. Philip Randolph Campus High School to provide programs for alternatively-assessed students – those whose graduation plan does not include passing Regents exams. Working in collaboration with the APRCHS Special Education faculty, CAW developed lesson plans that helped students build connections between art projects and content from other classes.

Projects included a tactile component, such as plaster-casting and modeling in clay, as an alternative to working with pencil and paper. A good example of this sort of kinetic art-making was a final unit on claymation. Stop-motion animation is a multidisciplinary art form that incorporates writing, sculpture, painting and digital video techniques. For this project, students wrote short scenes, built miniature sets, and designed characters using modeling clay. This part of the process is limited only by the imagination of the artist. Animating the characters, by contrast, requires a lot of patience and teamwork.

Students used a webcam connected to a stop-motion animation program to make minute adjustments to their figures in order to make them appear to move. The computer screen uses a split screen which allows the animator to compare where the figure was in the previous frame and how much to move it for the next frame.

“The stop-motion animation program only takes a few minutes to learn; however, creating even a few seconds of movement requires a lot of collaboration and planning. Communications were a particular challenge for our students, because there is a broad range of abilities. But they learned to help each other in unique and creative ways, and to build on that process and grow more and more every week.”

— Teaching Artist Abraham Salazar