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.