“Creating Art & Music” is an introductory course designed to introduce creative activities in the context of art and music. Thus far the course has been taught at the middle school, high school, community college, and university level (with appropriate adaptations for each level). Each week this fall, students in the course are posting their projects in this strand of the Snap! forum. Here’s a link to the course materials:
This week’s module is titled “Combining Art with Music”. In it, we will explore the ability of Snap to use sounds in projects. We will then learn how to synchronize these sounds with visual elements on the stage.
In 1940, Disney released Fantasia, an animated film consisting of eight segments set to pieces of classical music performed my the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski.
Figure 1. Fantasia theatrical release poster (1940)
The film’s style and narrative format proved to be revolutionary in a number of way:
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Fantasia was the first major feature film to blend animation with classical music on such a scale. Walt Disney sought to create “visual music” where the animation wasn’t just a backdrop but a core element expressing the emotional and narrative power of the music. Pieces like Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” were used to tell imaginative, visual stories, turning music into visual art.
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The film pushed animation boundaries by exploring different visual styles for each musical piece. For instance, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” featured Mickey Mouse in a traditional narrative, while the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” used abstract, experimental animation, blending surrealism and abstraction.
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Fantasia was one of the first films to elevate animated films into the realm of high art. At a time when animation was often viewed as children’s entertainment, Fantasia was aimed at adult audiences as well, making the case that animation could express deep artistic and emotional ideas.
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Fantasia inspired countless animators and filmmakers to think of animation as a serious art form. It also helped introduce classical music to a wider audience, using visual storytelling to make the music more accessible.
AIFF Fantasia Introduction (3 min) (Includes a brief interview with Walt Disney describing the conception of the film.)
Fantasia: Tocata & Fugue (9 min, animation beings at 3:40)
The assignment for this week is to create an animation with synchronized sound. You may use sprites from the sprite library, import sprites, or create your own in Snap. The animation can be representational or abstract. For sounds and music, we will learn how to record sounds in Snap! and write simple melodies or “motifs” using blocks in the Tunescope library.
Save your program to the cloud, share it so that others will be able to access it, and then post the link as a reply in this strand.
Please provide contextual information for your project. If there is anything in particular that inspired your project, please share that as well.