As part of our program, the Neighborhood Video Project, works with two consultants (a filmmaker and a local historian) in each neighborhood. We try our best to work with people who live in the neighborhood in which we're working and people who are knowledgable about the history of Saint Paul. These consultants don't come to every class, but they contribute invaluable perspective and experience to our program. They act as resources and sounding boards, as interview subjects and cinematography coaches. Most importantly they help connect us to the neighborhood. For our West 7th class we are lucky to work with filmmaker John O'Brien and historian Joe Landsbeger. Both have spent time in the neighborhood. Joe has a long history in West 7th and and is the current president of local cultural institution Sokol Minnesota and John is a former resident.

This past week at NVP John O'Brien met with the class to show us some of his work, which encourages the viewer to interact with history through a really cool interactive interface. John's pieces operate differently than normal movies in that you animate the frames with your mouse by dragging the movie frames left and right. The still above is from a piece called The Citizen: Interactive Surrealistic Media, which you can view, and interact with here.

As part of her work as a CTEP here at SPNN, Ariel made this great map interface for our NVP page.  Now you can see what we've been up to in each of our target neighborhoods by clicking the map.

In the future, we'll include links to our partner organizations from each neighborhood as well as information about community screenings of media created during each NVP session.

Don't worry about updating your bookmarks for our blog. It still displays on the NVP page, it's just below the map. 

With three classes left to go, the Connections Stop Motion Animation class is well into production on our final projects. Crews are using a variety of materials and techniques ranging from animating toys and action figures from childhood, folding origami boats, and mixing human and clay characters in the same piece.

The youth animators are also testing prototype animation rigs designed for us through a partnership with the Science Museum of Minnesota's Invention Crew 2. The Invention Crew is a group of high school students working through the museum's Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center to design solutions for community partners. The crew will take feedback given by students in this class to refine their rigs and come up with a final design.

You can see our first projects and read posts about different important stop motion animators by class participants on our class blog: http://spnnanimation.wordpress.com. We will be screening our final pieces on Saturday, March 20 at 11AM in SPNN Studio 1, come join us!