This past July, The Walt Disney Family Museum held its second annual Walt Disney Discovery Summer Camps, led by the members of our Museum Education staff. Working in teams, we developed three new camps for 2011:Artimation, Beyond the Funny Pages: Creating Comic Books, and Direct Your Own True-Life Adventure.
We kicked off the summer with Artimation, a week-long camp for emerging young artists. As the name suggests, Artimation was a combination of animation techniques and art mediums. For the animation portion, campers experimented with everything from zoetrope to clay animation, as they wrote story lines and learned movie magic tricks of the trade. For the art portion, each camper developed an original character and explored how to recreate his or her character using different mediums, including acrylic paint, clay, and pastels. The week culminated in a gallery show of the campers’ art work along with a video compilation of their animation projects.
Superheroes and supervillains jumped off the pages in the Beyond the Funny Pages: Creating Comic Books camp.Offered to youth ages 7-11, this camp challenged campers to create their very own comic characters to send on grand adventures and victorious journeys. During the process, campers discovered the art of storyboarding, and techniques for illustrating emotion and writing creative dialogue. They also learned how to give the illusion of movement to tell a visual story. The week ended with a Comic Convention where campers dressed as their favorite commercial super hero or the comic character of their own invention. Family and friends joined in the fun as they viewed their children’s comic tales of action, adventure, friendship and comedy.
Campers got their cameras rolling in the Direct Your Own True-Life Adventure summer camp. Middle school students developed, filmed and edited their own documentary films starring the history and activity of the historic Presidio of San Francisco. In groups of 3-4, campers used Sony Bloggie Touch Cameras to film their stories and the iMovie program to edit clips, add voice-over, and create unique special effects. The films featured such highlights as the colorful dog walkers on Crissy Field and the new indoor trampoline park, House of Air, while also including a few Presidio regulars, Yoda and Darth Vader (Both on view at LucasFilm.)
A Film Festival marked the end of this creative week as campers’ families and friends were treated to a screening of the documentaries. The Museum Education staff thoroughly enjoyed developing and creating these experiences, as well as seeing the talent and excitement of the campers. We’re already planning on the return of these exciting experiences for next summer while envisioning new experiences for our campers. Until next year!
Image: The Education team. (From L to R): Mary Beth Culler, Kristina Stasi, Raquel Valentin, and Ruben Esqueda! (Bottom row): Alyssa Carnahan and Hillary Lyden. (Not pictured: Allison Krieger).