Published Wednesday, February 20, 2008 11:08 AM
Updated Wednesday, February 20, 2008 11:10 AM

Provided
Sixth grader David Bolm from the Marrington Middle School of the Arts studies drawings he made as part of a class project to make short animated films.

Lights … camera … action!

He pinched his jeans and rubbed the fabric between his fingers. He pursed his lips.

During one of the opening scenes, he leaned toward a friend sitting next to him, pointed at the screen and said, “I worked on that!”

Mathew was one of 120 sixth graders from Marrington Middle School of the Arts in Goose Creek who participated in the recent Animated Film Festival at the Naval Base theater. The students, with the help of their teachers and a 3-D animation expert, produced the film themselves.

“It was a new experience, one they won't forget,” said sixth grade teacher Jane Cross.

The festival was made possible by a $5,000 “Arts and Basic Curriculum” grant made available by Winthrop University and distributed through the South Carolina Arts Commission. The money was used to pay for art supplies and contract an animation expert, Patrick Fitzsimmons, who works for a South Carolina-based company called Island C.G.I.

To make each film, the students followed a slow, painstaking process that teachers said helped them learn more about teamwork and patience.

First, they divided up into teams of six – four teams per class. Each team wrote a storyboard, or a scene-by-scene description of their film. Initially, the sixth graders were assigned to write about weather, but an 11-year-old's imagination knows no bounds … and they quickly expanded their topics to include tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes.

In their scripts, the students described each of these natural phenomena within the context of a story. In real life, events like the ones they were depicting could spell disaster, but here, that wasn't the case.

In one story, a cat is picked up by a tornado, but lands safely on the ground. In another, an octopus rescues a group of children from a beach before a Tsunami arrives (not exactly realistic, but they are, after all, sixth graders).  

Then, there was the filming. The students used paper rolls and other art supplies to design the backgrounds, scenery, and figures, which they put on the floor in front of a camera operated by Fitzsimmons. To move a figure across the screen – like a cat twirling around in a tornado – the students and Fitzsimmons would move it slightly in one direction, take a picture, move the figure again, take another picture, and so on.

It was a slow process. Moving a group of fish across the scene took 45 minutes. Each four-minute movie took two hours to film.

But judging from the reactions of the students, parents, and teachers at the festival, it was worth the effort.

“It was really cool, learning how to do that,” said Madison Bennett, 11.

Her mother, Caroline Bennett, worked at Paramount Pictures for 17 years, and was impressed with the students' work. “I thought it was wonderful, their still photography showed a lot of promise … they learned so much,” she said.

Calvert also enjoyed the experience of making the film, and if he has anything to do with it, it won't be his last: “It's really cool. It actually feels like what I want to be when I grow up, a cartoonist.”

Fitzsimmons said he enjoyed working with the students, and thought they learned a lot. At first, he thought it would be hard to get them to pay attention because of the slow process, but in the end, they stayed on task until the project was complete.

“If you can get kids to spend half an hour getting a creature to go across a background, they can pretty much do anything,” he said.