JibJab animation

I was trying to come up with a way to teach some simple animation techniques to my multimedia kids recently and I remembered the JibJab films. Specifically how they take a picture of a still face and animate the jaw to create the illusion of talking. It has the look of a ventriloquist dummy.

I wanted to show the kids who couldn't draw that they could still create some interesting effects. So, using Fireworks, we created faces with moving jaws and twirling eyes. I refer to these as JibJab animations because a lot of my students are familiar with the their films.

We exported them as animated gifs. The kids can now use them on web pages, movie projects and even Powerpoint presentations. Although I haven't figured out a way to show them in this blog or Google Sites. When you upload a picture to those two online services they are automatically turned into jpegs which breaks the animation. (At least I think this is what is happening......anyone else run into this?)

I can teach this skill to a group of kids (who already know Fireworks) in a class period. The majority of them seem to like it and I have caught them creating other JibJab animations on their own time. Because of student interest, I am working on a unit to use with my video class next year. I think we will attempt a short feature.

[Image captured from "This Land": JibJab: http://sendables.jibjab.com/originals]

Fireworks Tutorials

I've decided to use Adobe Fireworks as the graphics editor of choice in my classes. I've always been a fan of Photoshop and have used it for years. This semester I am teaching in a lab that doesn't have Photoshop installed. The cost of outfitting the machines with a program that will only be used this one semester is prohibitive. We do have Fireworks in the lab. In fact, we have a site license for the entire school. I was going to just use Fireworks in my one class and Photoshop in my others when I decided to go all out and teach it in all my web classes because:

• It is available on every computer
• It edits both vector and raster graphics
• Doing certain tasks are easier in Fireworks than Photoshop (less steep of a learning curve).
• If kids are into the graphics they can always move on to explore Photoshop or Illustrator.

The problem. I am not as adept at using Fireworks. So, what's a geek like me to do? I immediately started looking for tutorials online. I've found some good ones and I plan on sharing some of the better sites I find here. The first being a site put up by Joyce Evans who has written several how-to-books on Fireworks and Dreamweaver. She offers up a lot of video tutorials which are simple to follow and descriptions of books and DVDs you can purchase.

I've found the online video tutorials to be simple and easy to follow. I've gotten several lesson ideas already. Someday, I'd like to have a series of videos similar to this available for my students who miss a class or just don't get it the first time. Until then, I may point them to these easy to use clips. (Have to check to see if it's blocked by my district first.)

[Image captured from Adobe web site]