What's Cooking?

Delicious chicken stir fry.  And the teens at Kids' Cafe are such experts that they didn't even need a recipe. Here are a couple photos from yesterday afternoon . . . only a couple, though, because everyone got shy and asked me not to use their pictures.  Too bad.  They were great pictures!

We found our App!

A few days ago, I wrote about our adventures in stop-motion animation and bemoaned the fact that we just didn't have an app for the iPads that let us do everything we wanted to do all in one place.  Well, we found that app.  It's called Stop Motion Studio, and we're having so, so, so much fun with it.

First, I made a very, very quick animation of someone drawing a picture:

Then, the afterschoolers spent some time making their own movies.  At first, they didn't completely get the idea, and they just took a ton of pictures that then got mashed together.

After that, though, they started to get the hang of it.  One important lesson that I learned?  Afterschoolers can get impatient, and it really, really bugs them then they can't just move around a lot and have the animation just automatically work.

One way of animating that appealed to the ways that the kids wanted to work was to have the youth work on an activity while someone photographed it.  The result looked a lot like super-fast filming:

And then there were the youth who just wanted to dance!

 

Stop-motion Animation

We've been spending some time working on stop-motion animation lately.  This first movie is one that we made using iMovie on the iPads, featuring Hassan:

The iPads are great for capturing a lot of photos quickly and then funneling them right into iMovie, but there doesn't seem to be any way to turn off the Ken Burns effect when you're using iMovie on an iPad, so the stop-motion animation made with those can make you a little sea-sick.  Also, you have to adjust the length of the clips and remove the fade-in/fade-out transitions manually.

For this next video, we took photos using the digital cameras and then loaded them into Windows Movie Maker.  It takes longer to pull the photos off the camera, but you can set the length of the pictures before you import them, and you don't have to remove any transitions.  This video was made by Flastine and Rotha.  The part with the growing clay-person was Flastine's, and the part with the turtle was Rotha's:

This final video was made by Olive.  I believe if you look in the back, you'll see a meteor hitting the clay-person's house.  Poor clay-person!

Working on Comics

Yesterday in the afterschool, we made some comics.  First, we played around with the app:

And then, we started a graphic novel of Little Red Riding Hood.

I wonder what story we'll tell today?

Teen Tech Workshop

Phew!  A busy teen tech workshop today, and we're making some good progress on our online yearbook.  Will we make our deadline?  Here's hoping!  

Check out this screenshot of the Talent Extravaganza page in progress: