Leora Shachat sat in front of a computer monitor recently working with an animated ice-cream cone — six scoops high — trying to “parent” the scoops, meaning if the top scoop moved, the others would too, in a sort of ripple effect.
Meanwhile, two terminals over, Charleigh Barricks worked on the figure of a person of indeterminate gender, with lines for a body and rather bulbous knees.
With the help of their computer teacher Richard Klein, they imported Charleigh’s figure next to Leora’s ice-cream cone, to get the person to hold the cone.
Not so easy, as it turns out.
“We’re having technical difficulties,” Shachat said. Then came her shriek: “The bottom scoop of ice cream is bigger than his head!”
“It’s not a problem if you really like ice cream,” said Klein.
Luckily, with a few clicks of the mouse, the cone and its numerous scoops could be scaled down to the right size.
Leora and Charleigh are students in a weekly after-school class in computer animation at Oakland Hebrew Day School. But they are not learning any old kind of animation. The software they use was donated by Softimage, a subsidiary of digital media company Avid, and their teacher is an associate producer at Pixar, the Emeryville-based company — now owned by Disney — which was responsible for movies like “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.”
Galyn Susman, who has worked at Pixar almost 16 years in a host of different jobs, came up with the idea to teach the class. Her son, Jake Levin, attends OHDS and is in the class.
As there are approximately 18 kids in the class, Susman runs from terminal to terminal, with hardly a break in between. She high-fives one student, and exclaims “Dude!” and “Hey, you’re animating!” to another.
“Kids look at computers and see a word processor, a game engine and a search engine, and that’s all they see,” Susman later explained. “There’s a whole host of other things you can do on the computer.”
The class has proven to be extremely popular, said Klein. The students are fifth- to eighth-graders, and in the first half of this class, they all worked on animating a bouncing ball.
When they (mostly) had the basics down, they teamed up to work on their own mini-stories. They had to come up with the concept on their own, and pitched their ideas to their classmates, who then critiqued them.
Many other skills come along with learning how to animate, Susman believes.
The students will not be able to learn how to create convincing animation in such a brief time, she explained, but they are benefiting from learning other important skills.
“They are developing their visual acumen so they can develop their eyes and look at things and know what makes something convincing or realistic,” she said.
She continued, “Algebraic concepts, they don’t learn until high school. They can’t do equations but they have a visual picture in their minds of very high math concepts.”
When the class finishes in June, Susman hopes to schedule a party at Pixar, where the kids can come see their work at a screening room. The only problem is that Pixar is nearing completion on its latest feature, “Cars,” and competition for the screening rooms will be fierce.
Meanwhile, back in the classroom, Josh Fried worked on attaching an apple to a tree. He wants to animate it so that when the apple falls, the stem will fall with it, he explained.
While Fried uses computers a lot, he said learning animation software “is still pretty complicated. But once you understand it, you can use it.”