Program Seeks to Animate Future Show Biz Whizzes

April Tiscareno, 11, carefully considered the fanciful, two-dimensional puppet she had made from magazine cutouts and small metal fasteners.

It was her turn at the “lunchbox,” a high-tech camera device hooked to a monitor and a VCR that would allow her to make an animated movie, using her creation.

With help from college student Tyson Laurent, she was posing her puppet and deciding how many times to push the button on the rectangular box -- each click representing a single frame.

“The more times you push the button, the slower it moves,” April said of the speed of the animated short feature she was making.

April and her classmates -- including her twin brother, Jonathan -- are learning the basics of art and animation in a novel after-school program that grew out of a collaboration among the city of Los Angeles, an entertainment industry giant and one of Southern California’s premier arts colleges.

For two days a week throughout the school year, students 11 to 14 years old gather at one of five sites throughout Los Angeles for instruction in drawing, design, color approaches, animation and media technology.

By the end of the year, they will have amassed large portfolios of artwork, created dozens of animated short features and -- program collaborators hope -- tapped a creative force that will follow them into adulthood and perhaps lead to careers in the arts and entertainment field.

The Sony Pictures Media Arts Program, as the art and animation classes are called, had its roots in the cash-strapped Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department’s desire to find corporate partners to help provide art instruction for youngsters.

“I thought it was brilliant” for the city to tap the region’s vast arts and entertainment industry, said Janice Pober, a senior vice president at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

“We have such a need for animators and art directors, and here we have an opportunity to help provide a proper arts education,” she said. “It’s a work force development issue for us.... We need these young people!”

Sony teamed with the California Institute of the Arts and that school’s Community Arts Partnership to design a pilot project targeting youngsters of middle school age.

“Many of our after-school programs are aimed at younger age groups,” said Leslie A. Thomas, assistant general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department. “We wanted to offer something that would interest older kids.”

Sony donated about $125,000 in computer and video equipment and worked with CalArts to design the pilot program, which opened in 2002. CalArts, which has its main campus in Valencia, provides one of its faculty members and two student instructors from its character animation program for each of the five sites. Plans are to make the after-school program permanent and expand it when the pilot phase ends in 2005.

Students are chosen first come, first served for the free classes, open to Los Angeles residents in the targeted age group. Classes are limited to 15 students at each location for plenty of individual attention.

“But we don’t like to turn anyone away, so sometimes we have taken an extra student or two,” said Glenna Avila, director of the CalArts Community Arts Partnership. CalArts also helps provide other free arts instruction to middle and high school students in 40 Los Angeles County communities, Avila said. It oversees instruction, curriculum development and evaluation of the media arts program for the city.

Unlike many other after-school programs, the media arts classes are held at art centers, not on school campuses, because the centers are better equipped for animation work.

Families must make their own transportation arrangements for three of the sites: the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, the William Reagh Los Angeles Photography Center in the Westlake district near downtown and the Banning’s Landing Community Center in Wilmington. Transportation is provided for some students attending the program at the Watts Tower Arts Center, while the fifth site is at the San Fernando Gardens Community Service Center in a Pacoima housing project. Like the other centers, it is a short walk or bus ride from many students’ homes or schools, said Thomas of the city department.

Students receive six hours a week of instruction that could start them on paths to a variety of arts-related careers, including cartoonist, animator, comic book illustrator, video game creator and Web designer.

At Eagle Rock, where classes meet Wednesdays and Fridays, students one recent rainy afternoon worked on puppets and backgrounds for their short animated features. Some had been in the class since fall and their work had been highlighted in a video compiled at the end of the first semester.

That video included shorts of an imaginative basketball game on a futuristic L.A. freeway and such fanciful animals as mad cows and a giant blue clam-like creature. Two of the girls inserted moving photos of themselves into their work.

Nick Christensen, 12, said his father learned about the program from friends.

“It’s really creative. You can do a lot of different stuff,” Nick said.

And what does Jordan Vaylon, 11, like about the class?

“Everything!” he said, adding that if he were not at the art center, he would probably “be home, playing video games or maybe doing my homework.”

Working with another girl on creatures she called “piranha people,” Ayla Davidson, also 11, said the animation was a way of “expressing myself.”

Gary Keroglyan, one of the CalArts students who help instruct the middle-schoolers at the Eagle Rock site, said he loves teaching them.

“It’s amazing to see them pull off something really hard, like walk cycles and bouncing balls,” more basic versions of the same techniques he is learning in his animation classes at CalArts, Keroglyan said. He rattled off some things his young charges have mastered: storytelling, story poses, drawing and understanding how different shapes work in animation movement.

“It’s a blast,” CalArts video arts teacher Chris Peters said of the young students he works with in Eagle Rock. “These kids are so much fun, and we’re consistently amazed at the work they can do.”

Information about the media arts program is available through the Cultural Affairs Department, (213) 473-8434 or 473-8521. Enrollment for the fall sessions begins in late summer.