Soda Can Design

Submitted by: Luc Desdoigts - from France
Unit: Product Design - Technology - Animation - Pop Art (James Rosenquist - His official website)
Lesson: Soda Can Design
Grade Level: Middle School through High School (adaptable to elementary)

To see the 3-D animation (450 K size) go to: http://perso.club-internet.fr/ldesdoi/2004-01-ti.gif
To see larger 780 K animation : http://perso.club-internet.fr/ldesdoi/2004-01.gif [These animation links are no longer online and has no archive. If anyone finds where it has moved to, let me know.]

Theme of Identity - make a personal can that tells something about yourself and include an image of yourself. Limit to just a few colors. Have Facts/Contents on the cans about character traits and info about yourself.

 

Optional (For American teachers): Ameri-scapes - Theme on the American Dream (Collage of images a la Rosenquist) - have contents area be about America - what America stands for.

 

They will create a product design and logo design for their cans and plan target group, etc. Appeal to target group. Content area on can handled like a beverage can (Come up with a list of ingredients for your soda).

 

 

Low tech animation: Animation can be done with Digital Camera (use Mod Podge to glue printout onto a real can). Insert images into a PowerPoint with 0 seconds slide transition. Take picture of can on a black background or white background so it can be cut out - save each as a Gif image. Gif images can also be inserted into Image Composer Animation if you have Front Page software.

 

There is math involved as well. Think circumference, surface area and volume - radius - diameter. There is a lot more math you can involve when you get to the can contents part. What you might want to do is print out Luc's label and see if it fits around a can you have around the house. I didn't measure his to see if it worked. To glue onto the can, you will have to make little slits at the top so it will fit the curve - just be careful where you make the slits so it doesn't mess up an important part of the design. You might want to consider having your students make a larger labels - then photograph it and size to scale to fit the can.

 

One suggestion - from Cindi Hiers - would be to do this lesson Interdisciplinary with photography/technology classes. Her students are going to do the can (and/or box) design with colored pencils - all done to scale. They will wrap the labels around the cans and/or boxes - then have the photography students do the photos. If you try this - do let Incredible Art Department know.

 

Here are some "high tech" tips from Luc:

I just made the image with Adobe Photoshop (the size and the background of this .gif was the size and image used in this mapping of this free 3D-studio-MAX file for a Coca-Cola can, a .3DS file). I used an old 3D-studio-MAX-II (but I think you can use CorelDraw-3D (or even 3D freeware) to make this animation), and converted the result (.avi file) in an animated .gif with an old free Paintshop-Pro. Just look for "can 3DS" on any search-engine, you'll find a few files perfect for any 3D software.

 

I hope you will not have too many difficulties using 3DS-MAX, it's not a very student friendly 3D software... but very efficient, too (very professional indeed). And the students (never less than 16 years old) have a lot of difficulties with it (too many possibilities and options). However what I did is possible with the 10 first lessons included in the book of the software (so everybody who can read can do it). But anybody can make a "real film" on a real drawing pasted on a real can, and it could certainly be much more fun. (from Judy: and more doable "low tech" for  folks like me that didn't understand much of what Luc wrote to me - smile).

 

One of Luc's students (Luc teaches Art ed students) did this project with his students. The medium they used was Gouache. Lesson below. SLC was the name of the class.