Making a TED-Ed Lesson: Two ways to animate slam poetry

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/become-a-slam-poet-in-five-steps-gayle-danley
View original lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/become-a-slam-poet-in-five-steps-gayle-danley

Slam poetry packs an emotional punch by using powerful verbal metaphors; animation can do the same using visual tools. TED-Ed animators show how two separate techniques -- rotoscoping and more traditional hand-drawn animation -- bring to life the multilayered process of becoming a slam poet.

Lesson and animation by TED-Ed.

In this short video,

we're going to show you how we use

two different animation techniques,

both rotoscoping

and traditional hand-drawn animation

in the TED-Ed Lesson,

"Miss Gayle's 5 Steps to Slam Poetry:

A Lesson of Transformation."

A poetry slam is a competition

in which poets are judged on their poems,

often for qualities of emotional power

and lyrical resonance.

Our Lesson was created by Gayle Danley,

a veteran slam poet

who spent decades teaching children

to express themselves
through spoken words,

a Lesson, which offers
a guide to creating poetry

with immediacy and power,

also serves as a great
example of exactly that.

It's a story told in the form of a poem

that packs a real emotional punch.

She introduces Tyler,

who's sitting in an 11th
grade writing class,

struggling with the assignment
of having to write a poem

based on a personal experience.

The story is told from two perspectives,

one external

and one internal.

Miss Gayle's narration sets the stage

of the outside world,

and spoken word artist Pages D. Matan

performs Tyler's inner voice.

To set these two realms

of inner- and outer-experience apart,

a different animation technique was used

to illustrate each.

The real world was animated
by rotoscoping,

with a frame-by-frame tracing
of live-action footage

in black and white line art.

The animation depicting the inner-stream

of consciousness world of Tyler's memories

was traditionally drawn on paper,

featured watercolored backgrounds

and a more expressionistic design.

Once deciding on this general approach,

the project went right
into pre-production.

In animation, pre-production
is the planning stage.

It's all the decisions
that need to be made

before going and actually making the thing

in its final form.

This can include developing

the look or design of the piece,

experimenting with colors
and camera angles,

revising the script,

and so on.

All these decisions are important

because they determine
how much work and time

the production will take.

Extra time spent here figuring things out

can often save a lot
of time down the road.

For our project, a storyboard
was first created,

in which the framing,
composition, and imagery

for each shot was determined.

Then an animatic was made,

which is basically a movie
of the storyboard.

This helped us figure
out the timing of each shot.

It also helped us get an idea

of how well everything
would flow together visually

between our rotoscoped

and traditionally animated scenes

once they were assembled.

For the rotoscoped shots,
we first had to create

the live action footage to be traced.

Working with what we had
in our humble office,

we created a classroom of desks

using only one small table.

We shot this multiple times

from each angle the storyboard called for,

each time with a different volunteer

from among our co-workers.

Our source footage elements

then needed to be composited,

or assembled and arranged together,

before we could rotoscope them.

A composite is a special effects term

for a shot that combines
two or more elements in it

that were created separately.

To do this, we used After Effects,

a digital compositing
and motion graphics program.

The first step was to isolate

the part of the frame we needed

by masking off the unnecessary
negative space,

or parts of the frame we didn't need.

The individual shots
were then each layered

into one composite shot,

resized and arranged appropriately

to create the illusion of them

all being there in perspective
at the same time.

Every third frame was then exported

as an image sequence,

ready to be rotoscoped.

The tracing was done digitally,

drawn directly on a Cintiq monitor.

The rest of the animation

was done by hand on paper.

Unlike rotoscoping,

here the timing and motion
of the animation

was all planned out by the animator
ahead of time.

An appropriate number
of drawings were then done

to accomplish the movement.

Each animation drawing is then scanned,

registered,

and sequenced together in the computer.

That animation sequence is then composited

with the layered background art.

Camera moves are then
plotted out and executed.

One way that poetry uses language

to communicate emotions and ideas

is through the use of metaphor.

"Mama's lies are footsteps
too many to count

making excuses on black snow."

Animation's a medium that's also
uniquely well-suited

to communicating emotions and ideas

through visual metaphor.

Applying the dual techniques

of rotoscoped and traditional animation,

each with their own inherent looks,

allowed us to visually represent

the dual nature of the creative process

described in the Lesson.

There's the internal aspect
of experience and memory,

which is mined for inspiration,

and there's the external aspect

of revealing it to the world

through a structured presentation.

We combined both techniques
for the last shots

of Tyler delivering his poem to the world,

allowing us to convey
in a direct, visual way

the power of that moment of communication

when internal becomes external,

which, in both poetry and animation,

is where the magic happens.