The Ubongo team are busy, even outside of the office!
For a few weeks now, we’ve been working with the Grade 6 graders in Miss Vanek’s Digital Design class at the International School of Tanganyika (IST). Last week, they visited the Ubongo office to see what scriptwriting and animation look like up close and yesterday, we visited one of the classes to help them on their own mini movies!
The assignment was create a small video, no more than three minutes long, using recorded video and animated illustrations. The class broke up into groups to write scripts based on the IB learner profile but the real catch was that all the shorts had to incorporate a superhero theme!
Ms. Vanek and Tina speaking to the class
The first group got the characteristic “Balanced” and in their movie, they had an unsuspecting man eating unhealthy food, that was actually transformed villains, eventually turning him evil. The superhero then had to turn himself into food so that he could be eaten and fight his unhealthy enemies.
A logo designed by the “Balanced” group
Ines is an illustrator who squealed when she saw how our animator, Moahmmed, helped her group figure out how to spin their characters around. Ursula, a scriptwriter and camerawoman, said that Tina helped them with her comments on how to improve their movie by editing it with a focus on an age-specific audience.
Tina, giving story feedback to the “Balanced” group
The next group had “Communicator,” starring its hero, Mr. Communication, and its villain, MissCommunication (Get it?) The latter sabotages all programming globally and that is where the hero and his sidekick, Vocalize, step in to save the day. Mr. Communication is played by scriptwriter, Tristan, who was working on the script when we were visiting and he also showed the Ubongo team the special effects he was thinking on choosing. Vocalize is played by artist Alijawad who was looking for “cool sound effects” when we arrived and got advice on which sounds would work best and when.
Alijawad and Trsitan deciding on features
The “Thinker” team were producing a short made up of interviews regarding the showdown between the Incredible Mind superpower and mad scientist, Professor Z. Scriptwriter and animator, Chinwe, was looking for images of “satellites being crushed” that she could use for inspiration as artists Khadija and Fredrick worked on drawing jail cells.
Mohammed helping out “Thinker” animators
The last group got “Caring” and they took a different approach. They broke their video up into three separate stories each ending in a lesson about compassion from the superhero, Share-Care. Scriptwriter Saniya explained to me how that they did shorter stories to appeal to a younger audience with a shorter attention span. Movie maker Freya was trying to figure out how to make the image of Share-Care walk before turning and seeing that Mohammed had already taught her partners Troy and Oscar not only how to move it, but also how to transform it and make it big, opaque, rotated and more.
Saniya and Freya work on Share-Care
Miss Vanek remarked on what a difference it made to the kids to see the animation and film making process in practice with the Ubongo team, at our office and in her classroom. Ubongo is also meeting with the other section of Ms. Vanek’s semester long course and a screening has been planned for next week. There were lots of hugs and “thank you”s as we left!
