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Neither is a very experienced animator, but they got the hang of the software rather quickly in the Animation Explosion class.
“I don’t really like to draw, and I heard with this class you can animate stuff without having to draw,” said Quinn.
“I like making stuff move that shouldn’t move,” said Jacob.
The two were among the dozen students this week taking the Animation Explosion summer camp, a program jointly held by Olympia Parks, Arts and Recreation and Thurston Community Television, the local community and government access station.
Other classes on animation and video production are being held in Lacey and Olympia throughout the summer as part of TCTV’s efforts to increase young people’s education and access to the station, said Peter Epperson, TCTV community initiatives manager. Expansion into other parts of the county is planned for the future, as the station plans to start youth classes in Yelm next summer, and will follow with classes in Rochester and other locations, Epperson said.
The station aims to increase public awareness of their access to the nonprofit membership organization, he said.
“Not everyone knows about it if it’s not in everybody’s neighborhood and not hard to find,” Epperson said.
The youth program, which also includes classes at TCTV’s west Olympia studios, is part of the Young Producers Network. The station also has a media skills and literacy program for at-risk youth and young adults called YAYA Media, which focuses on documentary, news and public service videos.
Classes for youth include learning how to use YouTube, learning to edit video, make music videos and create animations using iStopMotion, a computer program that links together still shots for a frame-by-frame animation.
In the Animation Explosion class, students learn the basic concepts of animating in 3-D, as Quinn and Jacob did with their clay and plastic figures, or with 2-D artwork against a flat background, said instructor Sean Downey. After learning some basic animation and video editing concepts, students in the Animation Explosion class will spend most days creating their own project, Downey said.
“It’s usually under a minute or just a few seconds,” he said. “Sometimes they’ll spend the whole day on 30 seconds, but they could be the best 30 seconds ever.”
The classes also help give young people an idea of how media are created, a useful tool for a media-saturated culture, Epperson said.
The program “is based on trying to create 21st century learners, and a component of 21st century learning is media literacy and digital media literacy,” he said. “No one teaches us how to consume media messages. And there are so many messages that young people receive and they don’t have any means to understand how to filter them.”
Venice Buhain: 360-754-5445 vbuhain@theolympian.com www.theolympian.com/edblog
