Ainslie Henderson
One artist approach to making puppets and how they come alive using stop motion photography. “Improvising like making music and see where it leads you. Suddenly what is just stuff becomes this character staring back at you. They’re like little actors who only get to play one role. Everything that they do is their swan song.” ~Ainslie Henderson
Allie Rimkunas – funny art teacher
Great Falls Elementary School is fortunate to have Allie Rimkunas as their art teacher. Allie is a Teacher Leader with the Maine Arts Leadership Initiative (MALI). I’ve never had the opportunity to see Allie in action in her classroom but I’ve seen her in a workshop setting as facilitator and participant. If you ever have the chance to hang out with Allie, my advice is to, do it! She is so funny and fun to be around!
Allie designed a unit for her grade 5 students working with her intern – creating stop motion movies using ipads with the free app iStopMotion (creator is Cateater) to go along with their One School, One Book project. During January every student in grades 3-5 read the chapter book and younger children used the picture book by the same title, One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate.
The schools music teacher’s son wrote and performed the song and Allie broke it up into 5 – 9 seconds that the students illustrated. There were 24 teams of 4 students each and they were assigned 4-9 seconds of the song to animate. They researched the 5 basic types of stop-motion styles, created storyboards, set, and characters and went to work taping. The whole process took about 6 weeks.
Allie had been wanting to try stop-motion for some time but didn’t dare. When she learned that her student intern was a video specialist she decided to be bold and take a risk. Something that we often expect from our students. A student who was a whiz at figuring out the intricacies of the app was a huge help. One of the 5th videos is below.
Turned out that her intern came down sick so Allie ended up learning to edit with a little help from her son. She surprised herself and is proud of the work her students engaged in.
The first graders did shorter movies with a slightly simpler theme. They had to animate a poem and record themselves reciting it. One of the first grade videos is below.
me arts ed 