Soon the students were making all kinds of creatures so then they started getting to work on their stories …

The students learned to write a complete story with an introduction, a dramatic incident and a conclusion. They put themselves into the story and interacted directly with their imaginary creatures. 

We have a 1:1 laptop program, so these kids have their own Macbooks which they can take home. This gives them so much more time to really get into larger projects.

The kids having made their drafts consulted with the teacher about the story and had the grammar and spelling checked. They were then able to proceed onto the next level. We used the Comic Life program to build the story in. The students captured their creatures in various poses and layered those gif images over the background scene photos that they took with their laptop webcams of different school locations. Some students chose to Photo Booth themselves into the story whilst others asked their friends to hold their laptop whilst they acted out each scene.

Having got this far we watched the TED Talk on Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud for inspiration.

Then we learned about page layout and white space. We also learned about comic writing conventions and the meanings of the different shaped speech bubbles. Some students discovered the different image filters in Comic Life and experimented with the different effects.Once the comics were finished and had, had the final proof read check, the comics were exported to iPhoto as Jpegs.

We decided to take it to yet another level – inspired by that TED Talk again …

We imported the comic jpegs into iMovie and the kids narrated and recorded the voice-overs for each scene. After all of those were tweaked and cleaned up, the students added some extra sound effects and mood music and we were finished.

Wow – wonderful results. A new genre – Cartoon Comics. To view one of the comics, click here

http://gr5swa.blogspot.com/2009/03/spore-comics.html