Two Millbrook seniors, Kay Navia and Simone Doerner, have unveiled an exciting new opportunity for students. Their new animation club aims to welcome all levels of expertise to a space where students will be able to learn and try out different forms of animation. They hope to ultimately collaborate to produce a short film at the end of the school year.
“The first part would be teaching fundamentals so people can get the hang of it,” explained Doerner, one of the club’s creators, “and then afterwards, we’re going to divide people into groups, make sort of a small competition to create a story, choose one, and then make a short film out of that where everyone uses their own style and makes one film.”
The club appears to have taken off already. Based on its first gathering in room 3507 last month, Millbrook students love the idea of a school animation team built through the use of free platforms Stop Motion Studios and Flipaclip. “24 people showed up to our first interest meeting, so that’s very positive,” said Doerner. Navia and Doerner also added that they would like to use a free 3D animation platform, Blender, but that so many students have opted to join, they won’t have enough computers.
The co-founders emphasized that this club is for everyone. “The purpose of creating this animation club is to give kids a chance to tell their stories..we don’t want people to feel like they have to know how to animate amazingly before they can get into it.”
Throughout the school year, the co-founders hope to try out and teach about several sectors of the medium, from stop motion to cel animation. “I feel like people have very generalized opinions about animation when there is really a lot to animation. So, I kind of want to give kids the opportunity to learn about it more and give a little more respect to the medium,” said Navia.
The animators, both seniors, aim for their promising new club to continue on after their departure. There are a few club members the two have in mind to be possible successors. They also spoke of aspirations to extend their work past this school year, and hope to take the Animation Club to new heights by working with other Millbrook groups as well.
The co-founders want the club to be an opportunity to show Millbrook unity, and prove that two students can pull together a club with moving parts that can function as one to make a single work of art. “Animation as a whole is a very team-based project. You can’t just slouch on your computer 24/7 in the animation industry…You’re going to be spending five years making a twenty-minute animation,” said Navia. “Creativity, communication, teamwork, there’s a lot of things you can get out of our club in the long run.”
The two hope to show the Millbrook community that the artform that is animation should not be underestimated. “Sometimes we feel that animation isn’t taken as a medium, it’s more taken as a genre, like for kids movies and stuff,” Doerner said. “We would like to change that.”
