As such, their individual "subsidiary" companies include Ken Burns Media, Sherman Pictures, and Hott Productions. Įach member works independently, but releases content under the shared name of Florentine Films.
Hott had begun his career as an attorney, having attended nearby Western New England Law School. Hott did not actually matriculate at Hampshire, but worked on films there. The trio were later joined by a fourth member, Lawrence "Larry" Hott. Another Hampshire College student, Buddy Squires, was invited to succeed Mayes as a founding member one year later. The company's name was borrowed from Mayes's hometown of Florence, Massachusetts. In 1976, Burns, Elaine Mayes, and college classmate Roger Sherman founded a production company called Florentine Films in Walpole, New Hampshire. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in film studies and design in 1975. Living on as little as $2,500 in two years in Walpole, New Hampshire, Burns studied under photographers Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, and others. īurns worked in a record store to pay his tuition. Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where students are graded through narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and where students create self-directed academic concentrations instead of choosing a traditional major. He graduated from Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor in 1971.
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Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. Burns's mother was found to have breast cancer when he was three, and she died when he was 11, a circumstance that he said helped shape his career he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a significant insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive." Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction. Among places they called home were Saint-Véran, France Newark, Delaware and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father taught at the University of Michigan. īurns's academic family moved frequently. The documentary filmmaker Ric Burns is his younger brother.
Toontastic 3Dmakes use of standard story templates that help guide students through the basic elements of plot (story arc) as they create their animated story.Burns was born on July 29, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University in Manhattan. Toontastic 3D allows students to manipulate characters as they provide voice and narration for the story. The app walks kids through the creative process with a plot/story arc template and concisely explains the fundamentals of storytelling (setup, conflict, challenge, climax, and resolution). The app allows kids to choose the characters and setting for each scene and animate their characters by simply shuffling them around with their fingertips as they naturally would when playing with, say, paper dolls. Toontastic 3D provides a stunningly easy way by how it makes the complicated process of creating an animated short movie so simple. It's visually appealing, has great in-app support and sharing features, and relies on self-created animation and narration to tell stories.
Toontastic 3D is a powerful and engaging tool for digital storytelling and provides kids with a set of digital tools to create their own cartoons.