As an art teacher it is not the visual part that gets lost.  My actual title is “Visual Arts Teacher” so if I’m lacking in visuals  when it comes to storytelling then I’m not doing my job.  The part that I feel is left out of  the Visual Arts Classroom way too often these days is the story. Art teachers often have their students create exciting images that completely lack narration. To often, especially in the elementary art scene, you see the students making 25 versions of the same idea. There is no personal story coming from the artist/students. At AES I have been working very hard in several of my classes to make sure the artist is telling the story they want to tell.  I’m simply showing them how to use tools that will help them to do so. Isn’t this how real artist make art in the first place?  I often wonder why idea this so often lost in the art room?

In most of my art classes I want to make sure that students are connected to what they are making and that connections usually come from a personal narration.  This is where I am constantly trying to enhance what is happening in my room.  This is also where I see myself turning to writing teachers. We create our context for our images by coming up with a story. I actually do this by giving students prompts to reflect on experiences and write about them.  By continuing to reflecting on those brief writings of experiences and memories student are able to form their own expressionistic visuals. In this case and in most other works of art the artist is starting with the story, not the image. As a result students are more invested and the product is more visually enchanting.

I’m in the process of creating a new class titled Art in Animation.  When the subject of course 3 turned to Digital Storytelling my mind obviously went toward the creation of this class. Yet again, the visual is not the challenging part for me, it’s the story.  I have found from past experiences that when starting an animation project storyboarding is of extreme importance. I’m sure it is the same for any form of Digital Storytelling. Storyboarding is not all that different from the beginning stages of creating a Zen Presentation.  The story needs to come first. Afterall, Movies don’t start with pictures they start with screenplays, and before that they often start with a book. I was actually in the middle of putting this post together when I discovered Garr Reynold’s blog post just this week on storyboarding.  I urge you to check it out.  In it he shares many video clips that show how storyboarding works.  The following clip video that Garr shared in his post is the very one that first introduced storyboarding to me when I was a bit younger. I can recall watching this mini documentary when I was in high school and was convinced that storyboarding illustration would be the perfect job for me.