Central School held its annual Strawberry Festival and Art Show Tuesday and at the center of the show was an art project that’s been a year and a half in the making.
The stop-motion film titled The Star Within was the brainchild of Central Art Teacher Marc Nelson.
“I was listening to NPR and I heard the story,” Nelson said of the film’s plot.
Based loosely on a true story, the two-part stop motion film spans over 80 years, and tells the story of Ruth, a Ukrainian Jewish woman, who loses her family during the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe during World War II. Part two, picks up Ruth’s story when she is in her 90s and faces the invasion of her homeland, this time by Russian forces. Ruth decides to sacrifice everything and risk it all to save the life of a young girl.
“It’s a story of sacrifice where a mom saved the life of a child and the child has never forgotten it,” said Nelson.
This is the seventeenth year that Nelson’s seventh and eighth grade students have produced stop-motion films using clay figures. For the last six years, Nelson has turned the project into a group effort where students, using popsicle sticks, cardboard, fabric and other odds and ends, work together to create the figures and the sets.
“It’s almost done,” said Nelson, who plans to get the video up for viewing by fall.
Nelson considers himself a Holocaust educator. Illinois became the first state in the country to mandate that each public elementary school and high school include in its curriculum a study of the Holocaust. Nelson said he considers art as a means to explore and teach students about the weighty subject matter. Nelson has also used the graphic novel, Maus, by cartoonist Art Spiegelman, to teach students about the genocide.
Nelson also said that shop class is no longer taught at Central, so making the set and figures gives the students opportunities to measure, cut and use tools.
The stop-motion set pieces were displayed in the Steamer gym at Central, alongside artwork from elementary students, for viewing during the Central School Strawberry Festival.
