Madison Children's Museum

For two days, Tiny Circus landed in the wonderland of imagination and play known as the Madison's Children Museum. We set up shop in the heart of Possible-opolis, right next to the Hodgepodge Mahal, an indoor jungle gym made from salvaged and repurposed materials. 

 

Entire families were engaged in the animation station whiteboard extravaganza. Participants would grab a marker and draw a tree growing, rain drops dropping, or sometimes wiggly patterns, juggling insects, or an octopus swimming, and then we'd all step back, take the shot, and again, draw or erase a bit more.

 

Perhaps you can tell: it was Halloween. This is the first ever tiny bunny to participate in a Tiny Circus animation. All animals are welcome, of course.

 

We projected the shots onto a small screen, so we could watch the amorphous whiteboard animation as it was being created.

 

That evening we played our animations at the Museum event, Beakers and Broomsticks, for a rotating cast of costumed children and adults. (The History of Ghosts and Ghost Trap were in the line-up that night.) With so much going on in the space (black light painting, dancing, slime making), luckily people were drawn into our room by snacks, and stayed for the animations. Hard to beat popcorn + candy corn + Tiny Circus animations. We also debuted the animations created by the students we worked with at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The University of Wisconsin, Madison

When we arrived at Mark Nelson's Interior Design course at the University of Wisconsin Madison, it was a considerable shift from our project with the elementary school in Mount Vernon.

In Madison, Tiny Circus spent time with two classes in the Design Studies department creating animations. After some conversation about Tiny Circus, animation practices, and the storyboard process, the students got straight to work. In Mark’s class, they collaboratively brainstormed, storyboarded, and animated “A Day in the Life of an Interior Design Student.”

 

Jenny Angus’s class created short animations in small groups. The stories ranged from the love story of French bread and cheese to dancing Army men to a crafty spider (why spin a web, when a hammock is more enticing?).

 

 

On the last day of class we watched and discussed the completed animations. In the context of a design class, we discussed the value of listening to the reactions of people who are removed from the making process: do the animations communicate the stories we were aiming to tell?

      

The films premiered as a part of the Madison Children's Museum Halloween celebration. More on that to come.