| OCR Text |
Show Indian Curriculum Center Animates Navajo Legends For the past year members of the San Juan School District's Dis-trict's Navajo Curritulum Center have been working on a series of animated 16mm movies of the Navajo Coyote Stories. The first film of the series has just been completed. com-pleted. The films are tieing produced pro-duced in order to preserve both the Navajo legends and language which have been handed down from generation genera-tion to generation through the Navajo Indian medicine men. In fact, Jack Crank, a medicine man, was consultant consult-ant to the project. The completed film features featur-es the pranks of Mr. Coyote and the shrewd antics of Mr. Toad. The story bears resemblance re-semblance to the type of stories found in Aesop's Fables, Fa-bles, which have pleased En. glish speaking children for generations. In this legend, the little guy or Mr. Toad is taking advantage of by Mr. Coyote. All ends well, however, how-ever, as we learn that the little guy has just as big a claim on happiness as bigger big-ger fellows. An interesting facet of the project is the method of filia production. According to Kent Tibbitts, film producer, the films are T5elng produced using a computer. Apparently, Apparent-ly, the characters were first drawn by student and staff member artists and then run through a computer process which provided the animation. anima-tion. Several people were involved involv-ed with diffrent stages of the film production The computer comput-er work was done at the Computer Com-puter Image Corporation in Denver, Colorado. Right now, all of the films are being produced in Navajo Na-vajo language. Future plans, however, call for English versions. |
