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