An animated discussion
Cartoonist shows Judd students how to turn sketches into movies
BY JENNIFER AMATO
Staff Writer

NORTH BRUNSWICK - The faces of the fourth- and fifth-graders at Judd Elementary School were certainly animated on Monday as J.P. Somersaulter, a filmmaker from Chicago, shared his secrets to movie-making success.

Lights, Camera, Curriculum taught students about filmmaking techniques and the importance of exploring various fields of art as a supplement to regular academic education.

"I just kept doodling and drawing just because I liked it, it was a way to express myself," said the self-taught animator who never studied art.

Somersaulter began his presentation by showing the students a 16 mm movie reel and a movie projector from Chicago. He explained how the shutter on the projector opens and closes 24 times each second, meaning that thousands of pictures must run through a camera quickly to produce an actual movie, showing how important mathematical skills are.

"It happens so fast that your eye can't keep up," he said, "so it really looks like continuous action but 24 separate pictures are being shown."

He cautioned against not having any light hit the film for fear of overexposure, and told the group how science plays into movies in the developmental process which uses special chemicals to form the negatives. He also told how the projector lens magnifies the images, allowing them to be transferred onto a larger movie screen.

Somersaulter then explained how live action films are just that: live people acting in front of a camera. However, he prefers a more indirect form of filmmaking through the use of drawings, cartoons and puppets. Yet either type of art form requires the use of language arts studies, as a screenplay must be written and other artistic talents are used in the forms of drama, acting and music.

He also explained the difficulty in trying to make an inanimate object seem full of life. Borrowing the sneaker of a student, he animated the shoe by giving it different personalities, such as a tough guy, a French girl and an Irishman ready to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, by changing his voice and expressions.

"I'm not a magician but I can use this camera and make it look alive using this screen," he said. "Anything I wanted

the gym shoe to do I could do with

animation."

Somersaulter then proceeded to discuss his own movies, beginning with his version of "Rapunzel," which featured the scenes drawing themselves, almost like seeing animation in progress. There were black and white images that transformed into color and still animation combined with moving pictures. He showed how a story board planned out part of the movie, helping by organizing the individual frames.

"When we plan a movie we have to know what we're going to do so this is like a comic book," he said.

His second movie form was a cartoon he himself drew titled "Yo-Yo the Clone, Too." Somersaulter showed the students the cell animation he used, which is a solitary background on top of which other layers are placed so that the original scene does not have to be drawn repetitiously. For example, the character Yo-Yo had a stationary body and head but various arms were put on top of the first cell in order to create different effects. Somersaulter said the use of computer technology makes the picture insertion much easier than trying to do the same by hand.

The artist's third animation technique was with the use of puppets he created out of plastic eggshells and clay. He said this could be more time-consuming because each movement of the puppet must be slightly adjusted before being filmed. He showed the intensity with the help of a student, who represented a puppet falling onto a mat.

At the end of the presentation, Somersaulter challenged the students to create their own flip books. He suggested using white or yellow sticky pad pages and drawing simple images that varied only slightly from page to page so as the papers flip, the image seems to move.

"A movie is the same as a flip book, just arranged in a different way," he said.

Somersaulter's films have won over 40 national and international film festival awards, including CINE Golden Eagles and five awards at the Chicago International Film Festival. His movies have been featured in schools, libraries and local television stations.

Somersaulter visited Judd as part of the "Head Over Reels" presentation by the Young Audiences of New Jersey association. Young Audiences is a national non-profit organization educating children through school arts programs and services; the organization has been a partner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts since 1998. The program was also sponsored in part by the Arts for Learning program.