Todays session was about “cel-frame” animation, again we looked at some examples of contemporary cartoons they know and love and then took to making our own animation loops based on a stick man running.

As the group is quite young i.e. 7-year-olds I had to make up 12 Zoetropes in preparation for the lesson, this was no easy or quick feat by any stretch of the imagination. It was however quite simply worth it, for the looks on their faces when they got to see their characters come to life. They sketched out their charcaters, coloured them in,  stuck them together to make the loops and they were great.

I even learned something today, I learned how to animate a cape flapping behind a running super-hero.

Next week we will be planning out our animation, we are planning to re-make “Little Red Riding Hood” with each group making a scene each, they will be divided into groups and given roles.  We will storyboard it, build sets, animate, edit, narrate and score it all in 4 weeks (8 hours).

I haven’t blogged about this group because I blogged about the first group in detail, but these guy are certainly worth mentioning as they are a group of 12 7-year-old game designers and they have been spot on with their work.

When making games with students I let them use a bit of custom graphics software that I have coded (in Processing) it doesn’t have a name, but it does a lot. Firstly, I give each student a number, they put that in and it automatically saves all files with that number in the title i.e. good1.PNG for the good guy so I know it belongs to student number 1. It is extremely useful when dealing with so many graphics from so many games. Secondly it saves everything for them,  generates a background colour and crops the images for compositing later when put into the game engine. Thirdly it limits the graphic size 64×64 pixels maximum keeping the game retro in style and finally it only allows the use of 16 colours again for making it all very retro. Very simply you click a colour and click where you want it to go, one pixel at a time, sound laborious but it make the students really think about each one of their pixels when transferring their paper sketches into a computer.

But there is one thing it doesn’t do.

A lot of the games in this group for some reason or another feature doughnuts, subconsciously it entered the minds of around five of the twelve game designers and now we have them in the games. Repeatedly throughout the session I was asked “How do you draw a circle?” which struck me as odd. Odd because I grew up in pixels, I have been sketching out characters on graph paper since the 80′s (I spent most of my school days drawing sprites btw). So I had to stop the lesson and explain how to draw circle one pixel at a time. It turns out that the students are very fluent in Microsoft Paint which is great and some of them have even ventured in to Adobe Photoshop which is fantastic, the more varied software the better. The one thing these wonderful pieces of software feature is pre-made shapes that you can re-size. It was a wonderful “digital” moment, but is this a skill that has been lost? Drawing the doughnuts was tricky because they were circles with smaller circles in them, but we got through it. The question is are “hand-made” graphics becoming a lost skill?

I am certainly not about to add circles and squares to the software, because I really want them to think about how each pixel effects the overall sprite design, but this was an unintended bonus in terms of preserving a “old school” way of doing things.

Back in November I was asked to be one of the “cutting edge” developers at the Power of Minds Hack with Honda, organised by Rewired State, in one word it was” excellent”.

I was fortunate to team up with Emily Christy, Sym Roe and Kevin Fong for a project called Bike Alert, on the day it was voted best in design and now thanks to the readers vote it has received an additional £2000 to be developed further.

You can see the full article on the Guardian website which explain the the whole project here.

I am very excited about the win, I however am having to bow out of the project due to teaching and studying committments, I wish them well and I hope you will check out their work and progress. It is a great project and I hope it will save lives.

(Picture courtesy of Rain Rabbit on Flickr @rainycat on Twitter)

Today the students took on “stop-motion” animation, after watching a few clips the students made their characters out of egg boxes and then animated them.
It was a good session they are a very lively bunch of kids, well behaved and were very pleased in seeing their little characters come to life.

Next week is all about “traditional cel-frame” animation and we will also be making some Zoetropes too!

A new year, a new group of students and an entirely new course, animation.

Here is one of the videos made at the end of the first Springfield Junior Animation workshops with Year 3′s (7 to 8 year olds). The robot “D-BOT” was pre-made before the workshop and has paper fasteners as hinges in its joints.

“Image taken from workshop prep”. During the first session the students went through a brief history of animation and looked at two distinct styles “silhouette” and “cut-out” and had a go at trying both styles using premade assets. They also made a Thaumatrope all of their own.

It was a great session and very different for me teaching that age range, next week we will be looking at stop-frame animation and having a go at it ourselves.