Ruben Moreno

Ruben Moreno is an educator and media artist who specializes in doing multi-media productions with schools and community organizations. He specializes in doing interdisciplinary projects that let children and youth create their own original stories using claymation, video and digital photography. His residencies have taken him throughout Kentucky, Cincinnati, Tampa and Derry, Northern Ireland. Ruben serves as the chair of the Visual Arts faculty for the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts and has taught art at the college and middle school level. His projects have been featured on KET's Inside Kentucky Schools and Art on Air as well as in exhibitions at the Lexington Children's Museum, Cincinnati Children's Museum and Speed Art Museum's Art Sparks Interactive Gallery.

Art Form: Animation Arts
Grade levels:  3-12
Time line: One-week workshop, contact time 20 hours per week, per project
Materials: Construction paper, scissors, glue, clay and video. Video camera and editing unit provided by guest artist.

Activities and procedures: Students will learn the physics of animation. This introduction includes the concepts of persistence of vision and the Phi Phenomenon. Students will apply these concepts by making a flipbook or zoetrope. Working in project teams, students will develop themes for their clay animation project. They will write stories and create storyboards to organize their ideas visually. Designing their own sets, they will make backdrops, props, narration cards and animation characters for their production. Depending on the length of the program, students can also develop their musical score and voice-over soundtrack.

How the program can fit into a larger school education program: Animation is a very flexible, hands-on medium. As an art form it is infinitely compatible with many different interdisciplinary subjects and applications. Often through the process of making the animation, students discover a new self-confidence in themselves and their interest in a given subject grows as well.

Animation brings out the creativity and craftsmanship of students in exciting and surprising ways: Animation is successful because it uses a range of different skills and compliments multiple styles of learning. Animation lets all students use their specific skills to feel successful in the creative process.

Teachers can use their classroom animation project to support and strengthen their existing programs of study. For example they may wish to have students design an animation to illustrate a historical event or a piece of literature; teachers working on language arts or creative writing may want students to write an original narrative.
 
Academic crossovers: This project incorporates and applies concepts from science, art, music and math.

• Science concepts include how the concepts of persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon are used to create a moving image.
  
  
• Art concepts include how the visual elements of art and principles of design are used in a video production and the basics of theater production.
  
  
• Music concepts include learning and using rhythm and timing sequence within a production.
  
  
• Math concepts include using multiplication to calculate the number of frames needed per second, per minute, per hour and per 90-minute production. Students learn to use a ruler to build a set to scale.