The fourth annual Guyana Animation Network (GAN) Summer Camp was officially launched on Friday and is set to commence tomorrow.
The camp will run from July 15th to July 20th and will facilitate persons from ages five to 35. The students will be split into two classes: Class One, facilitating those ages 11 to 35; and Class Two, facilitating those ages five to 10. The focus of the camp is to promote digital literacy through animation, coding and virtual reality.
During the course of the camp, Class One will be creating a virtual reality experience of the Umana Yana, one of Guyana’s landmarks. The students will be studying a 3D structure of the landmark. During the class they are expected to be able to build features within the 3D structure of the landmark and through virtual reality will be able to interact with the features that they would have created. The class will also be focusing on 3D game development and cover subjects like physics, 3D graphics capability, scripting, along with others.
Class Two will be focused on bringing characters to life through various ways, beginning with flipbook animation. In that class, the campers will learn to create scenes using flipbooks that gradually change on each page, creating one seamless animation. The campers will then go on to creating virtual flipbooks online. This class will also be introduced to stop motion animation and will be able to create short films using the technique. On the last day of the camp, the campers will be able to showcase all of the work that they would have done over the five days at the camp to facilitators, sponsors and parents. Persons viewing on the final day will be able to experience everything through virtual reality.
According to President of the GAN, Francine Leitch, the classes will be held at the Centre for Information Technology at the University of Guyana, from 10 am to 2 pm daily. Leitch told Sunday Stabroek that Class Two, which will be the class with the younger students, will be focused on the basics of animation while Class One will be working with the Unity software. “The older ones, they will be doing animation as well but they will be working with Unity Software, so they will be creating by the end of the camp an immersive virtual reality experience of the Umana Yana landmark,” Leitch said. The president went on to say that they will be modeling their own characters within the landmark and will have a virtual experience of interacting with those characters by the end of the camp.
Two facilitators, Darlena Kelly and Terrieka Cardenas, who are both based in the United States, will be leading the classes during the camp. Cardenas was present at last year’s camp as an independent observer and expressed interest in the camp after seeing what it was about.
Leitch stated that this year’s camp will be bigger than the last, as they have catered for more persons this year. “Last year we would have catered for 50 participants and this year we’re having two classes with 50 persons each, so we are catering for more persons and we have more persons who are coming not only through registration but through sponsorship,” Leitch said. She went on to say that some companies that are sponsors of the camp went into underprivileged communities and sponsored some persons.
The camp is not only for persons who would have had prior knowledge about animation, Leitch stated. “They don’t have to have any prior knowledge of animation. We come prepared to work with you as though this is the first time you’re experiencing animation. What we do is not try to teach too much because we don’t want the same classroom setting at summer camp so we just try to lay down the basic techniques that they can use to then go home and do products themselves,” Leitch added and further stated that they would just provide the basic foundation and allow the students to creatively build.
