 Hi, I'm Jia-Yi. I am an artist and a teaching artist, and that means that I get to share the artwork I make with people like you. I like making art a lot of different ways. Sometimes I dance, sometimes I play with technology, but what material I really love working with is paper. So today we're going to work on some paper magic, and we're going to tell stories using paper. Theater and animation are pretty similar in a lot of ways, and in this project we're going to make all of our actors and our props out of paper. Sometimes when I do this project I use those pieces at the end to make stop motion animation. So I'll tell you a little bit about that at the end, but mostly we're just going to be focusing on telling stories with paper. So to make your piece you want to start by coming up with a storyboard. So that is almost like a comic where you figure out what's going to happen in your story. So I'm going to go ahead and use a pencil and a ruler, but it's okay if you don't need straight lines to draw out a grid on here. So on here I drew out some big rectangles and some small rectangles. I have some small rectangles underneath so I can add some notes if I want to. So I am thinking about a story that is of a creature in a boat, sort of like a Charmander-like creature with a fire on its tail. And I'm thinking that Charmander is sailing in the boat and then its tail accidentally catches the boat on fire. And so the boat explodes in flames and as the boat is breaking apart there are some pieces of wood in the boat. And Charmander grabs onto one of those pieces and uses it to float safely to an island. But it turns out that that island is actually the back of a turtle. And that's as far as I have with my story, but I'm going to go ahead and draw out what those images might look like. So I'm going to start with my boat. In the first panel I have Charmander and my boat in the ocean. And so the next panel I had to think about what happens next, right? So I think for me what happens next is that the sail catches on fire. So in this panel I have my boat with Charmander the sails on fire and there's some big exclamation points in the background. And the next one I think that what I want to do is the boat falling apart through Charmander and the water with some pieces of the boat and some smoke. Next I am going to draw Charmander onto a piece of wood and floating along. I'm going to draw a line just because I wanted to show that Charmander is moving forward. In the next one I'm going to have Charmander still floating in the water, but now there is an island coming into view. And so now Charmander is on the island. There's a tree on the island. And then in the next scene we want to find out that it's a turtle, right? So maybe the turtle starts to emerge. I'll put a little question mark there because Charmander is pretty surprised about this. And I think that's what I have for now. So this is what I'm going to work with. So now I have to think about what sort of parts I want to make. I can think about props and I can think about background and I can think about character. So I know that I need to draw Charmander for sure. I also want to draw a boat and a sail. I need to draw the ocean and some waves. I need to draw some fire. I need to draw pieces of the boat and a turtle and a tree. And all those different parts I'm going to draw separately. That way I can move them. So I'm going to go ahead and start. And I want to start by drawing my character. After I draw everything in with pencil, I can go ahead and color it. Color pencils work, markers work, crayons work. I already started on this earlier. So I'm going to pull out some of the pieces I worked on. So in here I have the beginning of Charmander, like creature, it's not exactly Charmander. Our waves part of the boat. And I have another piece of boat here with some fire that needs to be finished. So I want to keep working from these pieces. I also have some pieces that are already cut out. So I have a turtle and a tree and some waves. I also have an even bigger island. So I might use part of this too. This island is yellow instead of green. So maybe I want to color it in or I could use this for a different story. I also want some pieces of the boat that are just sort of in pieces, right? So I'm going to go ahead and pieces of boat. So this is a whole boat, some pieces of boat, some fire. I have another piece of boat over here and some fire. I started some smoke. I'm going to add a little bit more smoke. And then let's see, what else do I need? So I can look here and see. Okay, so I have my boat. I have my character. I need to finish drawing my character. This one's a little bit big though. So I think that I might finish this character instead. I have my smoke and my pieces here. I have some waves. So I think what I need are some exclamation points, a question mark, a smaller creature. These pieces of boat and I think I want to add some char to them as well so that we know that this is after. So maybe we can begin our story. I'm also going to cut this just so we have this piece. It's a little bit burnt. So this is my stage. I have my characters offstage and I have my storyboard over here. And my story begins in the ocean. There were many waves that day. A creature who is not Charmander but was very similar to Charmander was taking a ride on a sailboat. So Charmander was riding along in the boat. But unfortunately when Charmander walked across the boat Charmander's fire tail started to catch the boat on fire. First there was just a little bit of fire and then suddenly there was fire everywhere. Charmander was so surprised by all that fire. But as quickly as the fire came the fire started to go out. And in the water there were broken pieces of boat and smoke from the dying flames. And Charmander was still in the water and found a piece of boat to cling onto. And so Charmander swam. Charmander swam and swam and swam and passed by the boat and kept swimming until it saw what looked like a lush island with a tree and a single Charmander sized house. And so Charmander swam to shore and Charmander was so excited to be on the shore and to be safe and out of the ocean. But this island was actually the back of a turtle. And the turtle started to move and go on its own journey to be continued. So this is my story that I've told with pieces of paper. In it all of our actors are pieces of paper. All of our props are pieces of paper. You can also tell this story through animation. So that's probably the next step that I would do is to turn this into a stop motion animation project. The stop motion animation is when you take pictures and you take so many pictures in a row that when they play together they become a video. There's lots of different apps for a phone or for a tablet that you can use. Some of them are free and some of them cost money. And I'm not going to show you how to use any of those apps today but if you want to try it I recommend looking, just searching in the app store to see what kind of apps are available and trying it out. Thank you so much for playing with me today. I would love to see what kind of stories you come up with. Thank you. I'm Je and I love working with paper.