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Youngsters learn to be animators

JANELLE PATTERSON The Marietta Times Paxton Hudnall-Bolian, 9, of Belpre, watches the progress of his stop-motion animated film Wednesday during a workshop held in the Belpre Public Library.

By Janelle Patterson

The Marietta Times

jpatterson@mariettatimes.com

BELPRE –Sixteen local children went home from the library with a new title on Wednesday.

They were now animators.

“I predict whatever they’re doing today will be happening for weeks in my home,” said Amanda Hudnall, whose son Paxton, 8, was intently focused on each step of the stop-motion animation workshop held at the Belpre Public Library. “He’s usually bouncing off the walls so the fact that he’s totally locked in on this is huge.”

The workshop was put on by Alex and Jessica Thomas, of Taylor, Mich.

Alex is a professional animator who has worked on projects for Adult Swim, Cartoon Network and Warner Brother’s Studios including the shows “Robot Chicken” and “Spongebob Squarepants.”

The pair held three workshops Wednesday at Belpre, Barlow and Beverly’s public libraries, introducing children to the world of animation.

“But it’s also engineering and timing and mathematics,” explained Alex Thomas. “With stop motion you’re building everything that appears in the video, and you’re wrapping your head around these concepts in practice.”

With a pair of scissors, some markers, metal crafting brads and print outs of limbs, musical instruments, eyes and mouths, the group got to work coloring, cutting and piecing together their characters.

“I’m going to have my boom box and my guitar dance around and then as they go off stage I’ll have the pot I made fall on the boom box head,” explained Carter Chevalier, 9, of Little Hocking, as he showed his paper characters.

“I’m going to create a guitar guy and this is supposed to be fire (at the base of the guitar’s body),” explained Paxton. “But I need a black marker for the neck.”

He made a second puppet out of a drum drawing.

“Then he’ll dance around with a drum guy,” he explained.

And in 24 frames, with little musical notes moved ever so slightly between each take, Paxton did just that.

“I made him flip fast,” he added, explaining the dance moves the guitar made in his short film.

The Benson sisters– Katie, 17, Abby, 14, and Emma, 11– worked together on a plan for all three of their puppets to appear in a video together.

Katie focused on adding limbs to her green cello, while Abby and Emma added designs to their grand pianos.

“We’re not sure yet what they’ll do,” noted Katie, wondering if dialogue would be included in the video.

That question gave Alex the opportunity to explain further how the animation of mouths works, and the breakdown of sound per frame.

“That’s a great question, so audio, we always have everybody ask, ‘can I have my character say something?'” he said. “All animation is animated to the audio. You have the audio pre-scripted…For your character to say hello, you’d have to know how many frames (are needed) for the ‘H’ mouth, the ‘E’ mouth and so on. And then you’d be animating and switching out your mouths to sync up with those sounds.”

But that level of complexity wasn’t broached Wednesday. The group simply focused on the theme: Libraries Rock.

“We will put music to each of your videos,” noted Jessica Thomas. “Then we’ll mail discs to the library for each child to see everyone’s video in about a week.”

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