Tumo project leader Shushan Droshakiryan and the four Tumo students on her team have finished a stop motion animation project. They have spent an intensive four weeks working non-stop on the stop motion animation piece, using cutouts and hand-painted backdrops.

The story is narrated by Saro Paparian, a member of the Tumo music team and a native of California, who tells of a summer in Huntington Beach, when he worked odd jobs to save money for a surfboard he desperately wanted so he could surf with his father.

Another animation project led by French animator Atam Rasho has just been completed at Tumo.

Rasho is an alumnus of the famous EMCA animation school in Angouleme, and this is the second in a series of traditional animation workshops he is leading at Tumo. These workshops complement Tumo's main curriculum, and give members the opportunity to expand their animation skills.

This time, the group was tasked with expressing a character's mood and reactions through movement. Each participant chose a character and situation, and used Adobe Flash to express the character's emotions in that situation.

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Over the span of four weeks, Tumo students were introduced to skills in the art of acting under the leadership of Ani Nina.

During the first two weeks, participants studied different genres of monologues, in order to improve their stage presence and oratory skills. The following two weeks were devoted to selecting scripts from films and staging their own improvisations.

The results were showcased through a presentation of the students' creations, spanning across various genres. The young actors played in shorts from classical as well as Armenian films. The workshop gave the participants fundamental  acting skills and the ability to develop believable character performances for both scripted and improvised executions. 

Professional cartoonist Tigran Mangasarian led a group of 13 students in a specialized comic book workshop. Participants combined original drawings with narrative text to produce a collection of illustrated stories centered around the city of Yerevan.

The first step was for students to come up with a narrative—old or new, fictional or real—related to the city, and develop a script around it. Some chose to talk about real-life events, including events from their own personal lives, while others based their storyline on tales from the city's history.

After deciding on a story, students worked with Mangasarian to create carefully molded dialogue matched up with comic strip imagery. They kept their stories within nine pages and stylized their graphics using Bamboo pen tablets and Photoshop design software.  {phocagallery view=tags|tagsid=55,}

The beginner 3D modeling workshop is part of Tumo's core program. It gives students a first glimpse at creating three-dimensional models using industry standard tools.

Using Autodesk Maya, workshop participants learn about modeling techniques and build their first three-dimensional character or object over the course of four weeks using tool such as extrude, shape editing and polygon.

In the next level of the 3D modeling workshop students will work with more complex models and will learn how to manipulate camera angles, lighting and textures.

The following are some examples of models produced by students during the workshop.

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The Language of Film workshop, led by filmmakers Shahane Yuzabashyan and Vigen Galstyan, gave Tumo students and opportunity to develop and produce several short films based on one common script.

Workshop participants started by watching prominent examples from the world of cinema and analyzing them with the help of the workshop leaders. They then split into six groups, each of which developed a distinct screenplay and mise-en-scene, resulting in six different stories with identical dialog.

Over the course of the workshop, students discovered important principles of dialog and editing, which they applied in the creation of their individual narratives. They learned how to support the plot with editing techniques and how film styles and musical scores can assist in character development.

Below are some images from the workshop's final screening.

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A four-week workshop on game development provided beginner level Tumo students with an understanding of creating and programming video games. Using the GameMaker development program, students were able to conceptualize and produce their very own 2D platform games.

After participants were introduced to GameMaker's graphical tools, they used the software to develop a rudimentary video game prototype based on the platform game genre. The initial exercise gave students insight into programming game logic, level design, object motion, and collision detection.

In a second phase, students used these skills to craft their own individual video games. They brainstormed their overall theme and then proceeded to draw characters, design custom levels, set basic rules, and develop the game's controls.

Below are some of the basic platform games developed by participants in the workshop.

Hatem Imam, Maya Moumne and Maral Mikirditsian of the Beirut-based design and art direction house Studio Safar led a one-week, intensive infographics workshop at Tumo. The workshop focused on the after-school lives of Yerevan teenagers based on a hourly diary of their daily activities.

Prior to the workshop leaders' arrival, students spent one week documenting their movement around the city, their activities, and their interactions with peers, family members and strangers. They then filtered this information as part of the initial data processing phase of the workshop.

Once the statistics were mapped, participants were ready to begin visualizing the data. They split up into four thematic groups: Time, People, Activity, and Location. Each group pulled patterns and trends from their respective category and translated them into infographic posters.

The resulting visual displays gave a colorful and insightful into the daily life of young people in the city, showing the type of activities they are engaged in arranged by time, geographic location, and demographics.

Workshop participants included Tumo members with previous experience in graphic design, as well as students from the Yerevan Academy of Fine Arts.

A Fall 2013 workshop on the technical fundamentals of photography introduced Tumo students to the mechanics of DSLR cameras and functional techniques for enhancing photos.

Topics covered in the workshop aimed to understand exposure by learning to use aperture, shutter speed and ISO. After learning the basic principles of such settings, students worked in pairs to take photographs in the field and experiment with different techniques for governing light in images. They went on to evaluate their work as a group and selected their best shots for final submission. 

A total of nearly 200 students participated in two separate monthly sessions of the workshop. In addition to learning how to use professional cameras, they gained insight into key principles for capturing well crafted photos.

Below is a sampling of student photos from the workshop.

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Tumo students were involved in a two-week, multidisciplinary workshop led by the Beirut-based art collective Waraq. Participants combined storytelling techniques together with performing arts and mixed media to create an interactive installation space at the center.

Once the story concept was developed around the biblical figure of Noah, workshop participants divided up into five groups, focusing on dramaturgy, mask and puppet making, pixelated body movement, mixed media illustration, and interactive video installations. Each technique was taught to a different group of students who used what they learned to produce a section of the overall narrative.

Each group then chose a location at Tumo to house their installation and began rehearsing for the final performance.

In the end, a series of interactive spaces featuring sound, video, and live performance were linked together into a narrative environment. Audience members were guided through the spaces by workshop participants, who served as both creators and actors in the final performance.

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Thomas Laurent and Vladimir Nachbaur of France's Graduate School of Games and Interactive Media (ENJMIN) traveled to Tumo in September for a month-long workshop on the fundamentals of game development.

They introduced students to Construct 2, a user-friendly authoring platform that allows users to create 2D games without needing complex code.

After becoming familiar with the program, students used it to recreate their own version of a beginner-level video game called Sokoban. The exercise gave students insight into not only programming and design, but also how to link together graphics with sound and build up difficulty as players advance.

Students then worked in small groups of 2-3 to make their own video game from scratch. Working closely with workshop leaders, they developed their own concepts, levels and characters into a final multi-platform 2D game.

Below is an example of student work from the workshop.

During two weeks in July and August 2013, designer Nacho Martí worked with Tumo students to create a series of very special photographs at the intersection of digital technology and manual craftsmanship. Students built three pinhole cameras of different shapes and captured images of the Tumo surroundings projected on the interior walls of the camera enclosures. These images, transformed by the individual shape of each enclosure, were captured using digital cameras integrated into the design of the pinholes as a digital-analog hybrid.

The workshop started with a design phase during which students used the 3D modeling application Rhino to create the particular shapes of each camera’s enclosure. This included using parametric modeling to develop the complex 3D corner joints of the cameras, which they produced using 3D printers. Students then began the process of assembly, using wood, fabric and vinyl sheets to produce the lightproof boxes of each pinhole camera.

By the time the cameras were deployed and the images captured, student had learned fundamental concepts in 3D modeling, optics and photography, as well as basic skills in manual production and assembly. Just as importantly, the workshop taught participants the art of planning and teamwork in a creative technology project with multiple components and challenging deadlines.

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A group of 15 students participated in an intensive design workshop during the course of two weeks under the guidance of Lilit Beglarian. Participants explored the concept of art fundamentals and mastered core techniques forming a comprehensive visual library that helped develop their imagination and design ideas. They looked into the basics of design such as perspective, line drawing, references, thereby drawing inspiration from the world around them. Utilizing these skills, they responded to various design prompts such as Rescue Equipment, ending their two week workshop by polishing and presenting their designs using Photoshop.