Robert Lehman Digital Arts Center

Students throughout the Upper School work in the Digital Arts Center on a project-to-project basis in conjunction with another chosen collaborative discipline (i.e. Art Studio, Theater, Music, History, Science, Writing Workshop, etc).   An emphasis is placed on digital photo-collage, digital video editing and compositing, digital audio recording and editing and manipulation of digital photographs and scanned images for use in collaborative, cross-disciplinary projects within the students' existing curriculum. Learning the philosophy of using the computer as an artistic tool and demonstrating the utility of integrating it with traditional artistic processes and other coursework is the main focus.

Gracious Spaces: Take A Virtual Tour of Grace Church School

Seventh Graders working in Mr. Plenge's Computer Classes armed themselves with digital still cameras and photographed different classrooms and special areas of interest in and around the GCS campus. By taking 360¾ photographs of the various scenes and later stitching them together into seamless panoramic images they were able to map out a complete tour of the GCS school environs. Below are examples of some of the panoramic still images and a link to the complete QuickTime VR panoramic video tour.

QuickTime Player (get it here) and a FAST internet connection (DSL Cable or better) is required to experience the best viewing of this video tour. Please be patient and allow a few minutes for the complete tour to load!

Digital Blues
      Another on-going inter-disciplinary project in the Digital Arts Center is a project with the 8th Grade Music and Art students working under the guidance of Ms. Abrams and Mr. Plenge to compose and mix digital music for their Blues Poems they write each year as part of their studies of American Jazz and Blues.
Using MIDI keyboards, microphones, computer music sequencing tools and recording software the students play and sing all of their own compositions set to the standard 12 bar blues form.
Follow any of the links below to hear samples of some of our students' work:

"The Tie Song Blues"  
" Crazy Train"
" Acoustic Country Blues"
"Crazy Blues"
"The Kitty Blues"
"Untitled"
"Nowhere To Go"
"Drum-n-Bass Blues"

Action Heros: From Pencil to Pixels

Fifth grade students from the Art Studio classes create a fictional Action Hero and render their black & white characters in pen and pencil before coming to the Digital Arts Center where they then scan and digitially colorize their Heros with the image editing tool Adobe PhotoShop®. After adding the finishing touches to their hand-drawn Heros they then add titles and special effects to create simulated comic book covers.

Follow the link below to a page containing some of these Action Heros.

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Inequalities and Exclusion Photo-Collage/Image Essay Project:

Seventh Grade Students Explore Inequalities through Digital Imagery

Seventh grade students in the Digital Arts Center created Inclusion/Exclusion Photo-Collages/Image Essays based on the themes of inequalities and exclusion around the world. By gathering images from a variety of sources (photographs, newspapers, magazines and the internet) and digitally compositing them together into one large image the students told a visual story about inequalities and instances of exclusion throughout the world.

Virtual Tour Of New York City: Exploring NYC through the digital camera lens

 Seventh grade students in the Digital Arts Center created digital photo panoramas of their favorite places in and around New York City using digital cameras, tripods and the 360¾ image stitching software QuickTime Virtual Reality Authoring Studio®. A descriptive story or short narrative was also written to accompany the final image panoramas. The NYC locations were carefully selected by each student with an eye towards places that held special memories or personal significance for them.