By Jerry Slayton

Hello, All!

It’s time again for Jerry’s Summer Recap! Each year I have the privilege of hosting a summer art workshop series with Art Spark Texas. For the past 2 years we’ve explored Texas History in a virtual series we called Texas Stories. This summer we wanted to change things up a bit and offer an in-person workshop with a community partner, the Carver Library located nearby us in East Austin. This year’s project was called The Story Behind the Recipe, and it just wrapped up at the end of July. The participants created some amazing video projects over the course of 6 weeks that I’d like to share with you.

The focus of The Story Behind the Recipe was to bring together Seniors with Young Adults. Our senior participants, Pat and Mary, were responsible for bringing in family recipes that hold a special place in their memories. Over the course of two workshops Pat and Mary worked to develop their stories into a script. Pat chose to focus on her passion for the Hamburger, an American comfort classic, while Mary wrote about her Mama’s Apple Dumplings. Their stories were then recorded on camera. After that, they took their scripts and began to visualize them as a visual story by creating storyboard sketches to share with the young adult group.

Once Pat and Mary had established the main ideas for their stories, they passed that information along to the young adult class to begin illustration and animation. Yadira, Charles, and Kamand worked to develop the written stories into pictures. 

The group used the storyboards started by Pat and Mary and developed them further, adding visuals and thinking through the movements and transitions of the animation. Yadira and Charles decided to incorporate their passion for Minecraft into the stories by creating animation from screen recordings. The 3-dimensionality of Minecraft allowed for a greater sense of space in their animations, which all agreed was a benefit.

Finally, the group edited down all the video, audio, and animation content they had created around Pat and Mary’s stories and added some final touches such as sound effects and credits. The final products, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzPM_iH0v7w, speak for themselves, but I would like to congratulate this group of artists on a job well done. They were open to the process of collaboration, which can be filled with many unknowns at times, and were able to build a story together to that shows the strengths of each artist. Bravo!