All in all, this has been a pretty good week. Its hard to complain when your at a conference in Borneo, and there were some great offerings here at EARCOS, more than worth staying indoors for. 

Yesterday and today I had the great honor of co-presenting three workshops here at EARCOS with Breen O'Reilly, IB Film and video production teacher at the International School of Beijing.  Breen's name was mentioned to me even before we got to asia as a key person to contact in the development and implementation of a a film program.   Since then, I've had the opportunity to attend a few of his workshops, visit his classroom, and now co-present with him.   Yesterday, Breen led a discussion on Media Literacy, and how to help students read and analyze film. Following that, we hosted a 'job alike' session for film teachers (and teachers who wanted to use film and video in their classroom) during which we talked about various tools and projects. 

Orangutans, actually.  Kim and I are in Malaysia this week for the EARCOS Teachers' Conference in Kota Kinabalu.  Its gorgeous here. The conference starts tomorrow, so we spent the last few days with our primate relatives (when I was a kid my grandfather used to take me to the zoo and point out that the orangutans and I both had red hair so that we must be related).  First, we took a trip out to the mangroves to see the Probiscus monkeys, who kept their distance, and the Macaques who didn't (but weren't nearly as interesting).  The next day we went to the Orangutan recovery center which re-releases orphaned orangutans into the wild.   They were happy to walk right up to us (as much as the ranger would let them).  The three that we saw were slowly being weened off of human dependance.   The one rolling around on the ground was having a temper tantrum because the ranger wouldn't let him drink from the bottle.  Haven't we all been there before...

Its true that many title sequences are more artistic than the movie itself.  Creating an interesting interaction of text and image, to set the stage for a story has evolved into its own art form.  As we start working on longer term video projects, I'm more and more tempted to divide students into highly specialized groups to work towards a larger group project.  Putting one group in charge of a title sequence could lead to some interesting results.  

Today is the deadline for submissions for Rotoball 2009. We've already received a ton of wonderful and unique animations, and are anticipating some more great work from all around the world. If you have participated this year- congratulations on all your hard work. If you are interested in participating next year, check our website and watch this space for the debut of Rotoball 2009 on April 17th.

One of the cleaning staff was asking if she could clean up a table a student was working at after school. In my limited chinese I told her that she could. One of my students asked me how I was able to communicate to her when my Chinese is so poor.

Me: Everyone understands 'genius'.
Student: 'Jenese'? What is that, like Jewish-Chinese?

• Free teleprompter: Cueprompter

  Good for video production classes!

  tags: teleprompter, tools, podcasting, online, video, audio

The "Stressless Shrink", my friend Dr. Joel Schwartz was our middle school's visiting author last week.  I've known Joel forever, he's good friends with my parents and I read all his books when I was in middle school (grab a used copy of Upchuck Summer from Amazon), so it was a real treat to have him here.  

On Wednesday I had to throw away 7 brushes because the foundations art students hadn't cleaned up properly and I'll admit it- I was sort of annoyed. They're a great group and we'd already had more talks about clean up than I thought was necessary. I guess I was wrong. So today, I welcomed my 9th-12th graders with my warmest kindergarten teacher smile - a technique I had learned in earnest from two years of teaching technology at the elementary level. I told them we needed to take time out of our fun fun painting today to cover watch an important video lesson.

Then we watched Tricia Fugelstad's Young Sloppy Brush:



It seemed to be a good way to deal with the issue in class. They all got a big kick out of the work that Tricia and her students had done- and got the message that they were behaving a bit like elementary school students. At least, I think they got the message...

...if not, we're all learning the "Young Sloppy Brush" song as part of their final exam.

Thanks Tricia & Dryden students!

• 6 Totally Essential Photoshop Skills Even Your Mom Should Know

  Useful stuff in here, including the 'batch processing' function that every art teacher should know.

  tags: photoshop

It has been known for some time that Caravaggio used to work in a 'dark room' as he painted, and it had been suggested that the preponderance of left-handed figures in his artwork indicated that he had made use of the camera obscura. However, recent evidence suggests that he had actually developed* a photographic process using materials including lead and crushed up fireflies- 200 years prior to the 'invention' of photography.

According to this New York Times Article- it also accounts for his chiaroscuro style of painting and for his violent temper. Prolonged exposure to mercury can have an adverse affect on the central nervous system.

*no pun intended

We’ve been at the drumbeat so long – is the message finally beginning to take root? Here’s a quote from the pages of Educational Leadership’s March ’09 issue on the theme of “Literacy 2.0”:

As we consider the shift away from text centrism, it is clear that many of the skills needed to command the new media collage would, by today's school standards, fit best into an art curriculum, where concepts of color, form, and collage are part of the everyday narrative. Unfortunately, art—including music, drama, and the other arts—is largely viewed by K–12 education as, at best, an elective, and at worst, fluff to discard when money gets tight and No Child Left Behind bean counters bring high-stakes testing pressure to bear on school communities. Digital literacy demands that we treat art as the next R, just as important as the traditional 3 Rs. This is one of the most pivotal shifts in literacy that the digital age has inspired, and we should not deny our students these important literacy skills.

That comes from an article by Jason Ohler, who paints Literacy 2.0 as a “media collage,” drawing from the many communicative faculties in which students must be literate today – including linguistic, visual, digital, and time-based media. I can just imagine it: one art teacher for every English teacher on faculty in every school! Can you see it? Well, maybe not that fast. Still, it’s one thing to try and make the argument to the powers that be by waving a little article from an Art Ed. Journal. It’s quite another when it’s staring back at them from the pages of one of their own. How about dropping a copy or sending a link to the administrator or board member in your life?

For those who have been following David’s recent infatuation with the comics, there’s another great piece in this issue: an article by James Bucky Carter, who notes that comics and graphic novels are a perfect medium for bridging the multiple modalities – linguistic, visual, and time-based – that make-up this evolving model of literacy.

In preparation for Scott McCloud's visit, I've been checking his blog often and doing some planning some sequential art lessons. Here are a few interesting slide shows he linked to that take 'sequential art' in an interesting new direction for online viewing. The author of these, Yves Bigerel, credits McCloud's 'infinite canvas' with the inspiration in the creation of these alternatives.

I will caution you though- although they raise good points, the language is a little rough. I also have to point out something that is always a huge pet peeve with me (since I'm linking to it on my blog), the use of the term 'gay' as a pejorative. Now that I've got the disclaimer's out of the way, look around the rough edges and check out the interesting concepts:



about DIGITAL COMICS by ~Balak01 on deviantART


ABOUt about DIGITAL COMICS by ~Balak01 on deviantART

I am extremely lucky to work with some amazing colleagues in the art department here at SAS; obviously there is a little bias here since my wife Kim is among them. Another one is my friend and colleague Ellen Levenhagen, who has also worked in Kuwait, Japan, and Malaysia. Ellen and our National Art Honors Society students were the driving force behind our Expat Expose, a collaborative student art show that highlighted some of the best expatriate student work from Shangahai, Nanjing, and Suzhou.

The show opened on Saturday night at the lovely HWA'S Gallery, thanks to the generous donation of space from the manager, David. The contributed work was truly stunning, and I'll highlight a few pieces here. In addition to being wonderful products, they represent the results of an intriguing process and interesting lesson ideas.

These series of teapots come from Kate Thornburn's ceramics class at our other campus in Pudong. Each teapot serves two functions: pour tea, and tell a story.


I love this one, which tells the story of the girl whose head is attached to her body with the green ribbon.









The teapot in this short video tells quite a different story:



These little creatures, also by Kate's class, were inspired both by Oaxacan animal sculptures and the bizarre creatures that inhabit Shaun Tan's The Arrival (mentioned here earlier).







This picture, from Concordia International School, Shanghai involves a combination of four source images that occur in vertical strips: a self portrait, a childhood memory, a still life, a cartoon character. The results for this project combine these elements in interesting ways. The projects from last year's Expat Expose were also particularly memorable.

These expressive faces from Dulwich Academy are given more personality based on the chosen font. What font expresses you best?






This piece is an example of a neat unit Ellen does about taking a landscape and abstracting it- each student paints a realistic landscape on a field trip, and then abstracts it in a separate painting, choosing an artist to emulate.


Finally, this piece was created by an AP Art Student in my colleague Ben Holder's class. Her area of study is 'makeup', and she's investigating various sorts of applications of make-up through a series of self portraits. Here she is as a Geisha.


In the slide show below, you'll see some pictures of our opening as well as images that represent students working in different artist styles or movements, and various media and sizes. I hope the photographs do the work justice, and that you'll be as inspired with new lesson ideas as I was.

• Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp

  Excellent interactive website about Marcel Duchamp

  tags: duchamp, dada, history, reference, art history

Hi everyone, this is Bethany again, thought I’d check in…

In my classroom, we have been working on linoleum block printing after completing an intaglio unit. As teachers, you all probably know that teaching something is the best way to learn it, and this was my first experience with relief printing. I must say that I love it! What a cool way to play with color, line, texture and composition. For subject matter, we had the students crop a 6”x12” (or smaller) section of their best figure drawing using tracing paper. We assigned them to make 5 prints with at least 2 layers of color on each. However, many students have gone above and beyond. It has been so gratifying to watch the wheels in their heads turn and their prints develop into sophisticated artwork. I myself have been working on an edition which I just completed yesterday. It made me a little sad, almost like finishing a good book. All I’m left with are wounded fingers and a soggy, carved up piece of linoleum…and the prints of course.

For my schoolwork, I have have been working on a digital story for my Educational Technology class. The assignment was to make a 2-4 minute movie on imovie somehow academically related to my field. Luckily my field is art, so I had a lot of freedom! I’ve always wanted to illustrate a children’s story so I decided to go in that direction. This beautiful music video by Oren Lavie for his song, Her Morning Elegance gave me the idea to use stop motion photography. For the storyline, somehow I started thinking about the menacing pink slime that comes out of the bath in ghost busters…creepy! It was fun to channel my inner little boy and come up with gross ideas for why a kid would not want to get in the bath. I would love to do a stop motion photography unit sometime with my class, but I now know that it is very time consuming!

Here is my movie, Bath Time.

Here is another great interactive link that covers facial expressions, it is a free art lesson on drawing the face from the Academy of Art University. Click on the Expressions link, but they are all great.

Speaking of Scott McCloud, check out this great tool found on his blog.  The Grimace Project is based on an idea he talks about in his book Making Comics - that various complex emotions can be represented through a combination of six basic emotional states including; joy, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, and anger.  This fun little tool allows you to explore various facial expressions to get the right emotional state for the character or person in your artwork.  The above image illustrates a combination of joy and disgust, which is what I expect many of you experience when you read the posts here.   Anyway - I suppose a mirror would work as well, but how often do you get to play with somebody else's face?

Many of the restaurants here in China have lazy susans, since eating here is usually 'family style'. Trays with wheels are natural fun for video geeks like myself. If I have my camera with me, and there's a lazy susan around, I'll usually prop it up on a chopstick holder and get some fun shots of people around the table. This idea is more fun though- placing the camera on a Sushi conveyer belt in Japan. Very creative, the reactions from the unsuspecting diners (and kitchen staff) are quite fun.



Link via Boing Boing

Update: Anonymous writes in to translate what the waiter is saying in the end- he's explaining to the kitchen staff that the camera belongs to the foreigners.

I've been dying to blog about this for a while, but didn't want to jinx myself (although I don't know if the metaphysical laws of the 'jinx' applies to that which is online). One of my good friends and co-organizers of the Shanghai Student Film Festival, Mikey McKillip has been working hard to get Scott McCloud to come present at some of our schools in Shanghai, and keynote our second annual Shanghai Student Film Festival. It is no easy task to negotiate this kind of joint effort between multiple schools, but he's pulled it off.  We are so excited to have McCloud come and talk to our students.  He is best known for his non-fiction graphic novels about comics, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics, as well as his comic series, Zot!  

In the last few weeks, Ning has been blocked by China, wreaking havoc on my class' online presence at Student Filmmakers and THE LENS.  However, the gates seem to have lowered, and for now there's a clear path through the Middle Kingdom' s Great Firewall.  Ning is back, as is the Huffington Post, and a few other sites.