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Course: LearnStorm Weekly Activities > Unit 13
Lesson 1: Video library- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's humanities content creator on social belonging
- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Ceiba Prep Students on overcoming frustration
- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's science content creator on learning strategies
- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's humanities content creator on academic belonging
- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's math content creator on learning strategies
- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's test prep content creator on mistakes
- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Ceiba Prep Students on mistakes
- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's economics content creator on learning strategies
- LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Dr. Michael Merzenich on growing your brain
- Participantes de Brasil festejando su progreso
- LearnStorm at Pine Hill Middle School
- LearnStorm at Wewahitchka High School
- Activity 7: Chef De Cuisine on his career journey
- Activity 7: Salon owner on her career journey
- Activity 7: Teacher leader on his career journey
- Activity 7: Film director on her career journey
- Activity 5: Animation Director on setting goals
- Activity 7: Audio engineer on her career journey
- Activity 7: Dancer on his career journey
- Staging for image for End of LS Survey
- Begin Weekly Activity #2
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Activity 5: Animation Director on setting goals
Listen to Lisa LaBracio, an Animation Director, talk about her career goals and how she worked towards achieving them.
Video transcript
- My name is Lisa LaBracio. I'm 32 years old. I am an Animation Director at TED-Ed. I've always wanted to
do animation so it just, at whatever point that in high school when they tell you to
start looking at colleges and where you might to go and
what you might want to do, I was very tunnel
vision, this is the thing that I am going to do. So I eventually decided
to go to the school of Visual Arts which is
here in New York as well. And I chose that school because
they had a very specific focus on traditional animation. Which, for whatever reason,
is the thing that I really was sure I wanted to do. So not 3D, not computer
generated animation, but hand drawn, traditional cel animation. So I started school for that. And was in my first year of school, worked for an intern on an animated film, a feature animated film. That was a really cool project for me because he was still
shooting that film on film and animating it on cel,
even though a lot of places had moved on he hadn't
taken to digital yet. So I kind of got this
opportunity to work on animation in a truly old school way. I was painting cel's for him. And that was totally free
internship that, you know, I wasn't paid, I just
went three days a week during the summer I commuted
to work on that project. I started an animation in the
independent animation world, which is the low end of that. Working on documentary
stuff, and short films, festival films, projects,
ads when they come in, but all, you know, that's
the lower end of it. I work as an Animation Director
and as an animator there, so I actually work with
that educator to ideat. So to make that lesson, into
that script, into a video. As an Animation Director, what
will happen is that I will get a script early on in the process, and from there it's my job to research all of the information in
that script, as I'm trying to, of course it's been fact checked when it's come to me already,
so I'm not doing research in the typical sense, but
more in a visual sense. So I'll look at other
artist's work for inspiration, I'll spend some time on
Pinterest, I'll be reading up a lot of extra information
about the topic, looking at all the different theories, and communicating with
the educator quite a bit to ask questions and get more information. Then from there I start to put together a style board, or a look
and feel, for the project. So I'll start to decide what
method of animation I'll use because I work in traditional animation, so I do stop motion, hand
drawn, a lot of tactile elements as well, and then I'll
start to create characters and story boards, and
then at that point decide if I need other people on board with me to help me execute the project. As Animation Directors at
TED-Ed we get creative freedom. So we do get to decide what
style and what way to execute the project we get to do each time. Which is a major perk. That said, if anything that
we're doing is not in service of the information. So it's very important that we're creating an overall educational film. For what I do as an Animation Director, and especially working
on educational material, it's important to be really
strong with visual storytelling. And some of that is something
that just comes from having watched a lot of content, and some of it's from
having made the content, worked under directors
who made great decisions that you watched, and
sometimes terrible decisions that you watched, so that
way you can learn from that. But I would say that's the
number one important skill, is that visual storytelling. Which comes with a sense of like, what's best to have on
screen to tell this story.