Published: February 23, 2009 07:00 pm      

Students' art comes to life

TRAVERSE CITY -- Fade in.

Interior, The Art Place, Saturday afternoon.

Sixteen high schoolers engaged in a vibrant hum of creativity: generating animation cels ... shooting sketches for an animation morph ... meticulously moving fruit characters around for a stop-action scene ... placing cut outs just so for the camera.

It's just another busy weekend of the 2009 Student Animation Workshop, presented by Digital Arts Film and Television out of Detroit and hosted by The Art Place in Traverse City.

In one room, Josh Mulligan, a senior at Lakeland High School in White Lake, worked from a series of sketches to ink cels for his animated short "The Cuddle Monster." In the main meeting room, members of his production team filled in each cel with paint. The goal: more than 1,000 cels for the five- to eight-minute film.

"It's my first animation ever, my first take at any kind of motion," said Mulligan, a football player who also draws a lot and relishes the workshop's immersion with like-minded artists. His dream: an eventual gig at Pixar, where other alumni of the Student Animation Workshop have landed.

The workshop's second weekend session of four -- meetings are held monthly from January through April -- was dedicated to production. Students, who applied to the program and submitted a portfolio, came from Suttons Bay, Traverse City, Ann Arbor, Mt. Clemens, Muskegon, Clarkston and Detroit. Throughout the weekend they worked in teams on five projects.

"The best way to understand it is to do it," said filmmaker John Prusak of Detroit, who has led annual student animation workshops for DAFT for 18 years. "Film and video is a language, just like French or Chinese, a visual language."

The Student Animation Workshop is set up to mimic the real world in all facets of learning, from pre-production to a much anticipated big-screen debut of each feature.

The kick off began at the initial concept meeting, where in January each participant arrived with an idea to pitch. Students voted on the four best ones and then formed into production teams. All students are working together to create a fifth project, a morph animation melding images all contributed.

While computers are integral to their work, the animation itself is decidedly old-fashioned -- a conscious choice by workshop facilitators to ground participants in basic skills.

"The equipment always changes," Prusak said. "It's more important to get the concepts -- if they go into the theatrical or commercial world they're going to learn how that production equipment works."

The March weekend will focus on post-production while students at the final gathering in April will show their work and preserve it. In May, participants who completed the program will be invited to attend the Michigan Youth Arts Festival in Kalamazoo, an exciting venue to showcase their work.

An ambitious undertaking, the Student Animation Workshop is being held for the first time in northern Michigan. With interest from an active student animation club at Suttons Bay High School plus The Art Place serving as draw, bringing the workshop north this year made sense. Ten of the 16 participants hail from northern Michigan, including three from Traverse City high schools, six from Suttons Bay High School and one Suttons Bay High School graduate.

"We were so excited that this was an opportunity for Suttons Bay kids because a lot of those kids have been with us six years with (The Art Place)," said Chris Allen-Wickler, who in 2003 co-founded the nonprofit with Ken Scott.

Filling the basement of the Weaver Building on Union Street, The Art Place is a rambling, brightly painted space that has been transformed into a high-tech animation studio. In addition to serving older teens, its year-round roster of animation classes and workshops includes offerings for middle school students.

"That's really fantastic opportunity, the kids are making amazing stuff," Allen-Wickler said. "They are a little less driven by technology, in part because they are younger and because they don't have the same access (to equipment) as high school students do."

For more information on the Digital Arts Film and Television organization, see www.daftonline.org. For more information on The Art Place, see www.theartplace.org.