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The Illuminated Text Learning Center
This Learning Center brings together the active and popular forums, links, handouts, and lessons on creating and using Illuminated Texts in the classroom.
An Introduction to Illuminated Texts - A Screencast
This is the first in what I hope to be a long series of screencasts to help teachers and their students with the creation of Illuminated Texts. This video introduces the concepts of Illuminated Texts - shows and describes two of them - and gives an explanation of The Illuminated Text Learning Center. If you've ever wanted to know just what an Illuminated Text is - or if you want to hear a little history behind their inception, this would be a good video to watch. The presentation last about 10 minutes. Read more »
Cat in the Rain by Jenny Lee
The Illuminated Text that convinced me of the power and potential of the medium. This project explicates the short story "Cat in the Rain" from In Our Time. About a year and a half after this site opened, someone asked me how I got the idea for Illuminated Texts -- the answer for that one is easy: I saw Jenny Lee's "Cat in the Rain." Note: We now have a movie version of "Cat in the Rain" in case any of you were having problems viewing the Power Point version.
Click Here to View the QuickTime (video) Version of Cat in the Rain
Click Here to View the Power Point Version of - Cat in the Rain Read more »
"i carry your heart" by e e cummings - An Illuminated Text in Flash
This is the second Illuminated Text that I have created using this poem. As my students transition from Power Point to Adobe Flash -- I wanted to go through the process and acquaint myself with what they were going through for myself. I chose this poem because I love it dearly- and, to me, it is an ideal candidate for a text-based animation -- the words are rich, beautiful, and multi-layered. When I was writing this Illuminated Text - it occurred to me how much these presentations are like essays or writing in general - you need to have some kind of overriding idea or thesis and each piece must support and play off of the other.
The Well Tempered Illuminated Text - Power Point Edition
This handout is designed to save hours and hours of frustration - both on the part of the student on for the teacher. Power Point has some quirky "bugs" especially when it comes to getting sound to play correctly. This handout does not cover the basics (like making sure to have the sound start automatically and to choose play for 99 slides in effect options) - but it does cover some of the nondocumented aspect of Power Point (when it comes to writing Ill
Learning in a Flash: A Handout for getting started with Adobe Flash - especially for Illuminated Texts
This year I have started allowing my students to create their Illuminated Texts using Adobe Flash in addition to Microsoft Power Point. Initially the students were reluctant. Most of the students already knew how to use Power Point and did not know how to program in Flash. Because I made the use optional a few students started on it at a time and when new students wanted to learn there were others that could help them. Towards the end of the year I gave a class (after school) for anyone that was interested in learning how to create an Illuminated Text using Flash. The class lasted about an hour and the room that I gave it in was packed. Below you will find the handout for that class as well as two flash (in the form of .fla) files that I used for the demo. The class didn't go into depth, but was enough to get students interested and to wet their feet so they could see more information from the excellent help files and tutorials.
Start with the Words: An Illuminated Text Worksheet
Giving students time to work on Illuminated Texts in the classroom can be problematic. If you go to the lab (and only do it for one day) - the amount of work that will actually get done may be small. However - I recently created this worksheet to give students a solid beginning in the Illuminated Text creating business. It asks students to first identify the desirable aspects of Illuminated Texts that they have seen in the past and liked - it then tries to get them to think of those aspects - in advance - for their own presentations.
Onion Skinning (Fast & Powerful Animation) in Flash
This is a short and basic tutorial/screencast on onion-skinning in flash. (~5 min.) It's an swf file, by the way. Onion-skinning is a basic technique to animating in Flash. The concept itself is pretty simple. In creating an animation, you can turn on onion-skinning and see several frames of your animation all at once. The idea is to create a "smooth" motion while you're animating.
It's probably also helpful in case you just want to see more than one frame at a time - you can see where everything will end up being and things like that. Hope it helps (:
Basic Introduction to Illuminated Texts using Adobe Flash (Parts 1 & 2)
This is my Screen Cast for how to create and Illuminated text (using CS3 Professional). It shows how to do text appearances, movement and adding of sound (music in this case). [This is a great place to get started if you are just beginning to use Adobe Flash to create Illuminated Text - the author takes you by the hand and does a wonderful job of explaining everything as you go along.]
Creating Weather Effects - Frame to Frame Animation Effect in Adobe Flash
I was trying to show how to get an effect that would be good to use when portraying weather, like snow or rain, or stars and other things that may blink or fade in and out. The screencast makes the example look very choppy, but if you follow the simple instructions it will work. It may take long to paint in all of the frames but the final effect looks good especially with the words growing or shrinking, which I used in my Illuminated Text, just in case you want to see an example.
Breaking up and coloring text in Adobe Flash (Illuminated Texts)
This tutorial shows you how to make regular black text fade into rainbow text! [It also shows you how to convert text into symbols - break words into constiuent letters - and then manipulate the separate letters that you've created.] Check it out! The colors don't have to be rainbow. You can use any colors you wish.
Illuminating the Scarlet Letter
This was my first experience with using illuminated texts in the classroom. The results were mixed, but overall I believe that students really were able to connect to the text and draw out good quotations to use. I gave students 5 class periods to work on the assignment. Because it was their first time using advanced features of PowerPoint, there was a bit of a learning curve - especially with the music.
How to Make Text Fade In and Out in Adobe Flash
This is a screencast on the fading (in and out) of text on Adobe Flash. It's a very basic tutorial, first showing how to do it and the final result, followed by a more specific step by step instruction, with written directions on the lefthand side of the screen. It's very helpful if you want to do a fading effect in the beginning or end, or even middle of your illuminated text to show emphasis on those specific words. The screencast is approximately five minutes, very short and straight to the point.
How to create a screencast using Open Source CamStudio
This is just something to get people started. [This screencast will show you how to use the Open Source software - CamStudio and to create a screencast on your computer. A great tutorial it takes you through all of the neccessary steps - it was something that I was going to ask for - and someone read my mind. JRS]
Creating Falling Letters with Essential and Nonessential Text in Flash
This is a cool trick i learned that helps to emphasize a certain word in a phrase. [The author shows you how - step by step - to isolate different parts of your text - and to have certain words or letters - fall around that nonessential text - using Adobe Flash. JRS]
How to use motion presets (prepackaged animations) with text in Flash CS4
This is a screencast about using motion presets. Motion presets are cool entrances, exits, and movements that you can make your text do on Adobe Flash. These can enhance an illuminated text a lot, and they are extremely easy to use, so it would be worthwhile to at least take a look.