As reported previously, animator and community advocate, Gary Schwartz was able to make it down to San Antonio, Tx from Detriot, MI to team up with Victor of Sutton Oaks apartments and their youth to create a community based animation piece for Luminaria 2016.
joey lopez phd, corresponded with Gary before coming to San Antonio and Gary stated not only would he be available for Luminaria, but if hosted, he would love to perform additional workshops with other communities in San Antonio, Tx. joey took this as an opportunity to work directly with Gary to further openED SA’s pilot workshops and reached out to the education community to host animation workshops the week after Luminaria.
Counting the Luminaria workshops, joey and Gary performed over 11 workshops in 9 days. With Spare Part’s Mary Cantu putting the word out we were able to connect with Jorge Hernandez of Brackenridge High School to perform a workshops for his video class of roughly 25 students. It was amazing to see their new facility and meet future film makers. Their creativity and enthusiasm during the workshop was very appreciated. openED SA looks forward to further collaborations with Brackenridge High School.
Victor Zuniga, a CMC member was able to put joey in contact with the Henry Ford Academy High School and that was a phenomenal experience as well. We were able to work with over 70 students for an hour and a half, teaching them stop motion animation techniques and also gave an in depth presentation about the openED SA project and the inequities here in San Antonio. The Henry Ford Academy was a great experience and the students were so creative and energetic, both joey and Gary were blown away.
joey was able to reach out to Mark McCoin, the New Media professor at UTSA and arranged a workshop with the intro to New Media class. The students again were just so amazing and enthusiastic. Gary’s teaching approach in his workshops is to give a very brief hands on demo and then let the students take over the whole process, from directing to acting. This approach gave so much agency to the students and provided vibrant results.
We also were able to catch up with the Ella Austin after school program on the east side of San Antonio and did an hour long workshop with over 30 students. The students were super friendly and excited to work with Gary and we ended up making a short pixel animation where all the students were in the film.
In addition to workshops, joey and Gary also made it over to Cable Elementary for career day where they each gave six 30 minute sections about their respective careers. joey was assigned to third grade and Gary 1st. It was a great experience. After career day, we were able to give a workshop to Dr. Zavala’s 4th grade class. Dr. Zavala had a white board so Gary gave a white board animation workshop and the kids learned about perspective animation through rotating a face in a circle. 
Lastly, as joey is an associate professor at the University of the Incarnate Word, he was able to arrange 3 workshops for students in the Communication Arts program. The UIW students picked up the skills very quickly as well and by the third workshop the students were very creative with the medium. In addition Jeremy Zunker, a CMC member, also gave two demonstrations of his Z Fader, an audio mixing/scratching interface created for people who scratch and DJ with vinyl records. The students got to learn about how to take an idea from concept to actually having circuit boards printed, components soldered on and the testing and revisions involved when creating hardware.
Gary’s trip to San Antonio has proven to be a very fruitful one for San Antonio, we would like to thank him here at openED SA for volunteering his time to perform additional workshops. We look forward to bringing him back to perform addition workshops.
