Sarah Hatton:::

I am working on my MFA project these days.  Part of it has to do with working with a group of high school English Language Learners (and a group of awesome teachers and my profs Ellen and David and my friend Andreea, we make an awesome team).  In collaboration with the students, I am going to make a whole bunch of super cool animations that involve using the body to create motion paths to drive text objects and images and sounds within compositions.  The motion paths are 3d recordings made inside the SMALLab space.  (you can see a video of the SMALLab including details on the Embodied Poetry initiative in the previous post)  The point of doing this is to use the body to make action poems that create concrete representations of figurative language that can be hard for the foreign language learner to understand. We are focusing on idioms for this unit, because many English idioms include, actions, colors and parts of the body: all things you can leverage in the SMALLab. This example is one that I made on my own to be shown in an upcoming demo for the students.  This animation represents the idiom “you can talk until you are blue in the face but…”

I recorded myself holding one of the SMALLab objects low in the space and then I bobbed it up and down until I was standing on my toes. The values of the 3d actions are then applied to things like color as well as the size of the text objects that say things like “blablabla” and “can I convince them?” and “argue”.

Idiom: Talk until blue in the face from Sarah Hatton on Vimeo.