One of the local galleries hosts special events on the first Friday of every month from 5 P.M to 8 P.M. These events are run by some of the Penn State Art Education graduate students. The October 6th event was a GIF making workshop. The workshop was all set up in the front half of the gallery space so that visitors could still walk through the space and see the artwork. There were three stations set up: A drawing and storyboard station right in front, a performance station off to the left in an alcove, and a digital production station directly behind the drawing station. While I liked the 3 stations, I felt like the layout was too condensed and the drawing station could have been moved to the upper entryway in order to help lower congestion and make the flow a little more linear.
The grad students did a fantastic job with gathering the supplies needed for the workshop. Drawing station had plenty of paper, markers, pencils, and so on for the participants to use. The performance station had a wide range of props ranging from clothing items, to fake fruit, to a mannequin torso as well as a large sheet of paper along the wall for participants to draw on for their GIF. There were three sets of cameras and tripods for recording and then a handful of laptops to work with for editing. Finally, there was a projector set up to show all of the GIFs created and a refreshments table. One critique I have is that I wish there were more chairs set up around the editing/production station. There were lots of families and many people were stuck standing.
As far as what was supposed to happen, participants were supposed to go to the drawing and storyboard station and visualize what they wanted to portray for their GIF. Next they were supposed to go to the performance station and act out their idea with whichever props they want with the cameras rolling. Finally they were supposed to go to the production station with the SD card and import the data onto the computer where they had to use a GIF making website to edit their footage, speed it up, loop it, add filters and so on to make it GIF worthy. Once they were done they had to save it in a special folder that would then be shared with the computer hooked up to the projector and it then would be added to the GIFs shared on the screen.
For the most part, what was supposed to happen happened, however there were a few hiccups. The idea of what a storyboard is wasn't fully communicated nor was the complete purpose of the workshop. This meant that there several people who just staid at the drawing station for the entire time there. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this, but it did hold up the flow of traffic during the busy periods.
The children that were there were heavily involved with the first two stations, but then the parents often times had to take over come the production stage. This was to be expected though since toddlers might not know how to operate a mac.
At any given time, the second station seemed to be the least occupied.