The following is a description of a series of lessons that
I devised in October and November 2008 for a year 7 art
group, to make the use of Reallusion’s ‘Crazy Talk’. This
software has been nominated for an award at this years Bett
show, so I was asked to produce both for a reference and a
case study. In relation to my ideas for the Fairy Story
generator, ‘Crazy Talk’ was one of the possible solutions
for the creation of a talking teacher, who would answer
questions, or perhaps a narrator, who would introduce the
story and guide the user through the use of the
application.
User Study for Reallusion: ‘Crazy Talk’ in the classroom.
A series of lessons were based around four famous portraits
from four centuries of art history: Leonardo Da Vinci’s
‘Mona Lisa’, Rembrandt van Rijn’s Self Portrait from 1660,
Van Gogh’s self portrait of 1889 and a late portrait by
Picasso of Sylvette David, the ‘girl with a ponytail’.
I started by outlining the project, showing reproductions
of the chosen works and discussing them in relation to the
period in which they were created, the way in which they
were created, asking the students for initial impressions
and giving a little background information on the four
artists.
The students then did a copy of the Mona Lisa using
charcoal. Charcoal is a very elemental medium, wood and
fire, as old a drawing implement as it is possible to get!
We talked a little about Leonardo’s use of sfumato; working
with soft edges, the gradual and subtle blending of edges
that is most famously noted in relation to his painting of
the Mona Lisa. For homework students were asked to find out
a little about both Leonardo Da Vinci and the Mona Lisa and
to write a paragraph to include some of the information
that they discovered, but written in the from of a script
of what the sitter might have been saying to Leonardo while
sitting for him.
During the week my homework was to photograph the
transcriptions that the students had produced and to load
them on to a PC.
In the second lesson we introduced the self portrait by
Rembrandt. We talked a little about the technique of
Chiaroscuro; the use of strong contrast between the dark
background and brightly lit face, wondering if this
portrait was painted by candle light. Students then made
copies of Rembrandt’s self portrait using white chalk on
black paper.
While students were creating these transcriptions, groups
of two or three students at a time recorded their Mona Lisa
scripts onto computer. We used two devices for this
recording. The students are very used to Apple’s music
programme ‘Garage Band’ as they have been using this
software in their music technology sessions. By using the
‘podcast’ template for recording, there is no need to do
anything other than to hit the record button, the stop
button, and the save button. The second device I used is a
handheld recorder recently purchased for about £140 (the
zoom H2 that also works with the click of a record button,
saving .wav files directly on to an SD memory card.
As with the first lesson, students were asked to do some
research on the life and work of the artist and to write a
short script about what he might be thinking to himself as
he painted this self portrait. Some of the students wrote
their scripts on computers at home, and emailed them back
to me at school.
In the third session students worked from Van Gogh’s self
portrait of 1889, working with oil pastel, and directed in
particular to reproduce the effect of the strong swirling
brush marks in this painting, introducing the students to
the term ‘impasto’ and talking a bit about the short and
troubled life of the artist. I also demonstrated ‘Crazy
Talk’ to the group.
While students were working on this transcription, small
groups again made recordings of the scripts that they had
created to go with their Rembrandt drawings, and two
students used ‘Crazy talk 5’ to combine their ‘Mona Lisa’
scripts with the photographs of the reproductions that they
had created in the first week. Crazy talk 5 is such a
simple programme to use that they needed the briefest of
instruction before being left to work out for themselves
how to create their talking drawings. Once these two
students had got to grips with Crazy Talk though
experimentation, by watching the tutorials that came with
the software and through my demonstration, they could pass
this knowledge on to the next pair of students.
For homework students were asked to do research and a
script as before, this time on the imagined thoughts of
Vincent Van Gogh.
In the final two weeks of the project students created a
collage based on Picasso’s portrait of the girl with a pony
tail. In this final reproduction we talked about artistic
interpretation and abstraction, but also about the process
of sitting for a portrait. Sylvette David, the young girl
who sat for this portrait age 18 is now over 80, and an
artist in her own right. She has recently talked about her
experiences sitting for Picasso in a television
documentary, and also features in a children’s book by
Laurence Anholt called ‘Picasso and the Girl with a
Ponytail’, which tells the story of her experience with the
artist.
While students created these collages, as before pairs of
students recorded their scripts and created their
animations in Crazy talk.
With the time and resources available to us is was not
possible for all the students to create individual movies
in Crazy Talk, but by the end of this set of sessions all
the students had experienced either the voice recording or
computer manipulation, and we had a number of finished
‘Crazy Talk’ animations to exhibit alongside the wonderful
transcriptions and scripts that all the students had
produced.
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