Young Movie Makers Come to Tarble

Coming soon to a website near you: monsters, aliens, explosions and a runaway moose – all from a group of local filmmakers not yet in high school.

The creative minds behind these projects make up the Tarble Fine Arts Center’s fifth annual Stop Motion Film Workshop. Moviegoers are likely familiar with the finished form, as seen in popular films such as “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”, but not with the delicate patience such projects require.

First-time workshop student Kharl Woods described the stop motion animation process as “fun but hard since you have to keep moving the characters and keep taking pictures of them.”

When the photos are aligned and sped up, the illusion is that of motion. Workshop instructor Gabe Przygoda, a graduate student, said the techniques the students learn are geared towards fostering a set of skills that the young students will be able to be use outside of the classroom.

“The usual professional frame rate for animation is 12 frames per second; we have them doing something more like six or four,” Przygoda said. “Also, we try to teach them using Windows Movie Maker, which is something everyone has. If we taught them on a $200 program, then they wouldn’t be able to do it at home.”

Pryzygoda’s fellow workshop instructor, art education major Quincy Phipps, said it’s this merger of technology and creativity that draws the near dozen students to the workshop each year.

“In other art courses they work more with two-dimensional art and it’s primarily drawing or painting, it’s part of an older trade,” Phipps said. “But I think with moving more digitally they’re using more current forms of art.”

Many of the projects, Przygoda said, have a humorous violence to them inspired stylistically by cartoons and video games. One such work was from returning workshop student Josh Keck, the creative force behind a movie called “Space Jam 2”.

“Its nothing like the first one,” Keck said. “Its about aliens on the search for cereal, they have to go on a rampage in order to find cereal. “

As for the instructors, Phipps said the workshop offers a certain appeal that is more rare in the traditional art education world.

“I usually do basic art. I really enjoy these because they’re super excited about it,” Phipps said. “A lot of it deals with action scenes, about all of their pieces have action going on. Forming from nothing or disappearing, or falling into a hole and being destroyed. I think that kind of interaction between two things is something they don’t get to work with when they paint or draw or use clay normally.”

Students in some surrounding communities may not have the opportunity to use clay or paint at all, as Przygoda points out.

“A lot of the art programs in the smaller schools have been cut. I think the parents like having this opportunity here for their kids.”

While the benefits versus costs of art education may be up for debate among adults, workshop student Woods has already found a place for his newfound skills as a animation filmmaker outside the classroom setting.

Woods said, “If you want to make a quick little movie, something for a crowd to entertain themselves, then I think this is the best way to do it.”