OK Go Sandbox Animation

In my many years of teaching art, I’ve found that working with animation consistently engages and excites my students. For an art teacher, this medium is a bit like modern-day magic. I recently taught a new animation project that resulted in successful learning and fantastic artwork in all of my high-school art classes, from studio art to digital media.

Animation Exercise One
I introduced a short animation lesson that utilizes a free online program called Brush Ninja (you can also use FlipaClip or FlipAnim), which I paired with the OK Go Sandbox, a free online resource that offers interdisciplinary lessons based on the incredible music videos of the band OK Go.

If you havenʼt seen OK Go’s videos, do yourself a favor and watch them. The members of the band, who originally met at an art camp, use extraordinary creativity to visualize their songs in unique ways, from a Rube Goldberg machine to filming in zero gravity on an aircraft in the upper atmosphere.

I used the video and OK Go Sandbox projects from the song “The One Moment” to introduce how animation works. It was effective for this purpose because it was filmed in 4.3 seconds on a specialty camera and then slowed down, allowing for great slow-motion shots.

I invited students to create a simple nine-frame animation to try out the process for themselves and learn about the Brush Ninja technology. The tool allows students to draw with a variety of brushes, copy and paste frames easily, and use an “onion skin” feature that displays a low-opacity version of the previous frame.

Animation Exercise Two
We reviewed the twelve principles of animation, created by the great Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, to understand how to make animation more lifelike by applying elements from physics. I invited students to implement some of what they learned in another nine-frame animation using at least two of the principles.

The learning curve wasnʼt steep for students, and some began to create incredible animations far beyond what the assignment called for, so for our culminating project, we looked at OK Go’s music video “All Together Now.” The video, which was filmed during the pandemic in the four band members’ respective locations, promotes the idea that we are all united in this strange time and concludes with a tribute to healthcare workers in Los Angeles.

Collaborative Animations
The OK Go Sandbox project that accompanied this video was dubbed “Art Together Now” and invites everyone to create art together, so I challenged students to create short six- to ten-second animations that we could combine into one longer collaborative work. This compiled group animation required some commonalities, so even though I allowed students to create whatever they wanted, they needed to include the following elements somewhere in their animation: the words “all together now,” a drawing of an OK Go band member, and a moving object that shows one of the principles of animation.

I was astonished with students’ final animations; the work of students in my lower-level classes was on par with that of my upper-level students, and everything flowed so well together.

Expanded Exploration
Just after we completed the project, OK Go Sandbox announced a new project for the “All Together Now” song: a larger collaborative animation in which each participant can color in a frame.

Students had a chance to collaborate with a professional animator, and each student created one frame of the animation. The project was so popular that it resulted in six different music videos, and all of the animation as well as the music was contributed by crowdsourcing. Check out the amazing results on the OK Go Sandbox website!