Aspire Awards Medal Winners!

Back in April, five of my (now graduated) 8th grade students created a stop-motion animation film for Adobe Youth Voices titled "Gone".  The film was entered into the 2012 Aspire Awards Film/Media Festival.  Recently we found out the film was awarded the silver medal in the narrative category by panel of film professionals, quite an honor!

The students chose the topic of child soldiers in Africa for the piece.  They collaboratively wrote the script, created storyboards, created the construction paper artwork, photographed and directed the stop-motion animation, edited the piece in Adobe Premiere Elements, and produced the soundtrack in Garageband.  They amazed me with their creativity and work ethic throughout the process, and in particular I was blown away with the soundtrack they created, a very professional end result in my opinion.

Here is the artist statement written by the students:

"Thousands of children in Africa are abducted into war every year by corrupt soldier militias. These child soldiers are placed into extremely violent situations and girls are frequently abused and forced into unimaginably heinous acts. We felt we could most greatly help children forced into warfare by publicizing a story that has been repeated throughout the world far too many times. The intention for this piece is to educate other teenage children like ourselves as well as adults who may be unaware of these atrocities."

If you have not seen it, I hope you'll watch it now (below) and enjoy!