Despite the immediate association many have with animation and the fanciful world of cartoons, three faculty members have worked together over the last year to connect middle school students at North Park Montessori with the international animation community, GVSU faculty and students, and the real-world challenges they are studying.

The roots of this project go back much further. In the 1980s and 1990s, animation outreach by Grand Valley involved student participation in film festivals and conferences as well as participation in the newsletter of the ASIFA/Central chapter of the Association Internationale du Film d'Animation.

By 2006, Grand Valley animators were working with international partners to work with youth on projects that have been successful at festivals, ArtPrize, and at other international screenings.

The commitment to this outreach runs deep. For instance, Deanna Morse, now an emerita of Grand Valley’s film and video production program, continues to mentor alumni and students through the outreach program.

Proudly taking up the mantle and honoring all who blazed the trail, Suzanne Zack (affiliate professor of film and video production), Bob Swieringa (assistant professor of communication studies—with a background in history, theory, and criticism of film), and Julie Goldstein (assistant professor of film and video production) collaborated a year ago on animation for Kent County Friend of the Court, creating short videos that make the bureaucratic processes they must explain on their website far more accessible. 

Grand Valley now has an Animators Guild, an official student organization of about 35 people which is mentored by Julie Goldstein. They have an interest in outreach and worked directly with North Park Montessori kids on the stop-motion animation videos that Friend of the Court needed.

It is the mission of Friend of the Court “To serve the Court and the families of Kent County to ensure children are supported, both financially and emotionally” so the friendly animations on https://www.accesskent.com/Courts/FOC/ proved a great way to accomplish that goal. It was also an opportunity in service learning for writing students at GVSU who produced the scripts for the eight videos.

Friend of the Court Operations Unit Manager Julie Vredeveld said, “the collaboration with GVSU and North Park Montessori is enabling us to better educate the parties involved in domestic relations cases, in an entertaining and memorable way, so they can navigate the sometimes complicated court system.”

Strong partners make for great collaborations. For a decade, GVSU has partnered with the Grand Rapids Community Media Center, whose Director Gretchen Vinnedge continues to work with current faculty and students on their outreach projects such as the most recent one at North Park Montessori in Grand Rapids.

This year, Suzanne, Bob, and Julie worked with Grand Valley students, North Park teachers, and Gretchen from the Grand Rapids Community Media Center to provide middle schoolers with the experience of producing animation on the important subjects they were studying such as geographical events and environmental impact. 

Despite topics such as the unaddressed, extreme pollution of a Chinese city, the students find they have to grapple with the impulse to create “Hollywood endings” for their videos, and fruitful discussions arise from this expectation for a happy ending.

This engaging pedagogy is powerful because the clay animation used, kept simple, helps students to think in terms of symbolism, visual representation, and story structure, which allows them to develop an expanded visual language outside of traditional character animation.

Julie, who is the subject matter expert for this collaboration, noted that, “We talk to them about the three phases of production—the initial concept and scriptwriting of preproduction, the production work itself in which the sound file becomes the foundation for the 24 frames a second of film which are shot as 2 pictures for each of the 12 separate movements in the clay, and finally the post-production. In post-production, sound effects and other additions bring the work together.”

Many people were involved in each of those stages. Affiliate Professor of film and video production Joe McCargar spent a day with the kids recording the narration based on the students’ own research. Gretchen Vinnedge brought the Grand Rapids Community Media Center’s equipment to the school, including tripods, cameras, and computers so that they could use the stop motion animation software, Dragonframe. Suzanne put the audio on the computer so that, phrase by phrase, the animation could be matched to the audio.

The students had been coached to use simple forms that could be easily manipulated on the Plexiglas stage with colored paper beneath which forms the animation’s backdrop.  Grand Valley students worked in two shifts to mentor small groups of North Park students and helped them to work within the time constraints of the shoot.

“On the computer they could see the progression,” Julie explained.

In all, twenty projects by 60 students working in teams took a little longer to create their animations than was estimated. Robert worked at the Community Media Center with those still needing to finish up. In the end, all of the students got through production.

In post-production, GVSU students helped to edit the footage and add music and sound effects as well as adjusting the levels of the narration. Suzanne acted as the producer so the Grand Valley sound designers would check with her about various aspects of the project in post-production.

The professors will in the future look for additional ways to simplify the process in order to allow the North Park students to be more involved in post-production.

But this year, the full effect of the post-production wizardry added to the wow factor at the April 20, 2018 premier of the videos at North Park Montessori’s multi-purpose room. Family and excited animators could hardly believe their eyes as they watched their work on the screen. Now wiser to production values, they noticed small details such as the adjustment to narration levels, demonstrating that they had remembered how many differences in volume there were between students as they performed the scripts.

The time and effort of the Grand Valley faculty and students as well as Gretchen’s help through the Grand Rapids Community Media Center catalyzed the efforts of the North Park students into extraordinary engagement with their subject, new-found visual literacy skills, lessons in collaboration, and an appreciation of how the contributions of many became such praise-worthy products. It is hard to imagine how this project could fail to produce a lifelong love of animation and perhaps even some future students of film and video at Grand Valley State University. And in reciprocal fashion, Grand Valley students and faculty have been enriched with the experience of sharing their love of their discipline with an eager audience.