Such a joy to share our new Bilingual story, Animals and Vehicles! + ¡Animales y Vehículos! – illustrated with beautiful drawings by children, and stop-motion animation created with scissors and construction paper.
Adventures in stop-motion animation with filmmaker Devin Rice are a wonderfully fun new world. Who knew construction paper chickens in a car could speed across a lovely paper landscape? How can a dog floating with spaghetti balloons be so beautifully moving?
Stop-motion is a gently magical contrast to crazy CGI. Taking one photo at a time while slowly moving pieces of construction paper with the eraser end of two pencils (the accidental perfect tool!), and a few fun googly eyes.
With a computer and digital camera, it’s a hand-crafted, high-tech artform full of charm and possibilities – keep a lookout for more stop-motion at Sparks.
Animals and Vehicles! was written by request for Jonas, as a lively celebration of alliteration and wordplay – in English. Thanks to the amazing Dora Arreola, the Spanish ¡Animales y Vehículos! isn’t a literal translation, but a lively new version playing with the sounds of words in Spanish.
With free English and Spanish animals and vehicles vocabulary!
Sparks Creative Stories was honored to share this story as a Bilingual performance with fantastic vocal sound effects of monkeys, trains, taxis, spaceships and a brontosaurus by the fabulous actors Jessica Aguilar and Jan Neuberger at the President Obama Main Library in St. Petersburg in April, directed by Jim Rayfield and illustrated by our lovely audience.
And thanks to the wonderful University of South Florida Family Study Center on the gorgeous St. Pete campus, more kids and families got the opportunity to illustrate three different videos of Animals and Vehicles! in English, in Spanish and Bilingual.
The spectacular English performance as a fun tongue-twister game is by fantastic film and TV actors and teachers Eugenie Bondurant and Mary Rachel Quinn.
The wonderfully fun solo Spanish version is by Jessica Aguilar, a terrific USF Theatre student with a gift for vocal sound effects.
And more good news! Thanks to the City of St. Petersburg Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism, Sparks will be creating free English and Spanish Alphabet videos with the amazing projectALCHEMY Dance company, with many thanks to Paula Kramer for the inspiration!
Plus a wonderful Bilingual Kindergarten-ready Science series with the creative researchers at the world-renowned Breitbart Lab at the USF College of Marine Science and the Clam Bayou Marine Education Center – and the marvelous visual artists at Creative Clay!
And working with the amazing Ketsy Ruiz, to help get the word out!
Thanks so much for reading, and so many thanks for sharing!
And thank you for subscribing to the Sparks Creative Stories YouTube channel ❤️