Students Show a Real Interest in Their Animation Classes

His fingers moving rapidly over the computer keyboard, Musa Mustafa “sketched” a hat on the screen and maneuvered it onto Gumby’s head as a visiting Soviet animator shook his head in delight.

Fedor Khitruk, president of the Union of Soviet Animators, was tickled again when Mustafa, selecting from a computer display of colors, created green eyes for a cartoon alien.

“I would like to take this toy,” Khitruk said finally.

Despite the glare of movie lights and the high-tech wizardry of the video, sound and film-editing equipment surrounding him recently, Khitruk wasn’t touring a Hollywood studio. Instead, he was in a high school classroom in Rowland Heights.

Not that the teen-agers’ productions are anything to dismiss lightly.

Within the last decade, animation students at Rowland High School have produced more than 1,000 films and won about 50 international prizes.

Six Rowland animation students brought back prizes from this year’s International Student Media Festival in Dallas, the 10th consecutive year the school has won first-place awards in that competition. Last summer, three live half-hour shows produced at the school, featuring sights and activities in Rowland Heights, were aired by local cable television stations.

Coaches 200 Students

Animation teacher Dave Master coaches 200 students at the high school, and four other teachers instruct 125 students at elementary and junior high schools in the Rowland Unified School District.

Students from throughout the district, as well as graduates of the program such as Mustafa, 21, gathered at the high school for the visit by Khitruk and Czechoslovakian animator Jan Svankmajer, who were in Los Angeles last month for the third annual Los Angeles Animation Celebration.

Through an interpreter, Svankmajer answered questions after a screening of his surrealistic work.

A vignette featuring two tongues aroused plenty of curiosity. Real pig tongues were used, Svankmajer said, with wires inserted in them to make them more lifelike. Some students giggled or said “Ugh.”

“For every (camera) take,” Svankmajer said, “we had to bring a fresh tongue from the slaughterhouse because they deteriorated very fast.”

Rowland Unified’s animation program was created single-handedly by Master, who joined the district as an art teacher 12 years ago.

In 1977, Master assigned an animation project to his art class at Rincon Intermediate School as “just something to try out.” With one camera, the students made a 10-second film that combined drawings, paper cut-outs and clay.

The following year, his students’ works were praised at a Los Angeles film festival. District officials let Master start teaching animation full time, then encouraged him to move to Rowland High to develop a more in-depth program. In 1984, he won the California School Board Assn.’s “Golden Bell Award” for excellence in education.

Meanwhile, Master helped develop animation classes in the district’s other schools, conducting workshops and sharing equipment with fellow teachers. Today, he said, Rowland Unified is the only school district in the country that offers animation classes beginning with the elementary grades.

Teaching Workshops

Several students have transferred from other high schools to Rowland to continue studying animation. In response, Master has begun conducting animation workshops for teachers in other districts, said district Supt. Sharon Robison.

Through film festivals and competitions, Master has developed close ties with professionals in the field who have donated sophisticated equipment as well as their time to share tricks of the trade with his students.

Master was president of the Los Angeles Student Film Institute for four years and has served for seven years on the Education Commission of the International Animated Film Society.

An early supporter, Bill Littlejohn, an animator for “Peanuts” and “Garfield” cartoons, described the Rowland students’ works as remarkably sophisticated.

‘Better Every Year’

“Everybody’s thrilled to see them,” said Littlejohn, who often judges at film festivals. “They have good gags, and they get better every year.”

June Foray, the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel in “Bullwinkle” cartoons, often visits Master’s students to give them tips.

“It’s very gratifying that he starts teaching them early,” said Foray, who gave the animation program its first recording unit.

Atari Educational Action Research Group has donated a $10,000 video-camera animation system, and Apple Computer Inc. has given the program three rooms of sound recording and mixing gear.

Today, Master’s 200 high school students can work with more than $800,000 worth of animation equipment.

Master’s classroom looks more like a large workshop. Boards bearing the titles of award-winning films and star-shaped pieces of wood with the student producers’ names adorn the walls. Current students hammer and saw to build sets ranging from dollhouse-like homes of plywood to cardboard mountains and painted rivers.

A wall-sized sheet of fiberglass, spray-painted black, provides a backdrop for space movies. “Starlight” from fluorescent tubes shines through holes drilled in the sheet. Hanging nearby is a planet improvised from an abandoned lamp shade.

In other rooms, students edit film and sketch cartoons: 90 drawings for each 10 seconds of film.

In sound studios, students select from a wide range of prerecorded sounds, from the roar of a jet to human screams. They can also create their own effects with synthesizers, which can stretch or compress any given sound.

Another room houses a haphazard array of cameras, goose-neck lamps and miniature sets. Clay figures star in the films made here, painstakingly shot frame by frame as their tiny limbs are moved by fractions of an inch.

Because each frame lasts only one-eighteenth of a second, the figures, on film, seem alive and moving. This process is called claymation, the art that brought Gumby and the singing California raisins to life.

Students plan how the character should “move” and at what pace, what camera angles to use, and what expression the character should have. Often, multiple heads are created for each character because the originals tend to melt in the heat of movie lights, said 11th-grader Matt Manning, who won second place among 10th- to 12th-graders at this year’s International Student Media Festival.

30-Minute Cartoon

“When you do it yourself, you see how much work goes into a 30-minute cartoon,” he said.

For his two-minute depiction of a snorkeling adventure, Manning spent two months building his set, often working after school. He stuck clay fish onto a glass sheet that he moved in front of the camera for a realistic underwater effect.

Master’s 15-year-old son, Brian, combined claymation and live acting in his story of a boy horrified by creatures that pop out of a book. The youth is finally sucked into the pages and trapped. The work won third prize in the ninth-grade category at the same festival.

All the students learn quickly that making an animated movie takes time.

“With beginners, the titles are twice as long as the film,” said Master, whose students average one film a year.

“Sometimes the character would fall over, and we would have to control ourselves, make sure we didn’t smash him,” confessed student Mike Lorge.

He and classmate Stephen Wood came in third among the 10th- to 12th-grade entrants at the festival with a claymation fantasy about a monster that escapes from a TV set. To prevent their figure from melting, “After shooting we would stick him in the fridge,” Lorge said.

Master sees his class as an opportunity to experiment with a variety of art forms and a painless way to learn technology.

Some graduates have gone on to become professionals. Mike Belzer worked on the Gumby series for a year. George Wong has helped make children’s movie specials with puppetry and animation effects that have aired on ABC and HBO.

Many other alumni continue to pursue their hobby with a passion.

Mustafa created a laser show last year using computer animation for a college project. He remembers scratching film while looking through a magnifying glass to create the illusion of laser beams when he was in Master’s class.

A part-time Apple Computer employee for two years, Mustafa is working on an animated version of the David Letterman show during his spare time.

Samples Won Job

Former student John Ramirez, 21, said his animation samples from Master’s classroom probably netted him his job with Battaglia Associates, an Irvine company that designs theme parks all over the world.

Ramirez, who won 34 animation awards as a student of Master’s from age 12 until he graduated from high school, has just completed some costume designs for a parade at the Tokyo Disneyland. He was also on a team of 12 that designed an amusement park for Lotte World, an entertainment complex in Seoul, South Korea, due to open in April.

For a dinner show on the Lotte project, he designed 15 robotic birds--each will cost $25,000 to construct--that will perform like those in Disneyland’s Tiki Room. He also designed the floats, costumes and props for a parade that will wind through the park.

Ramirez said that in his work, “character design is the big thing, and that I learned in the animation class: what makes an appealing character.”