Today was the final session of the animation group, last week they worked really hard at making all the characters for their scenes today was all about using the animation skills they had learnt throughout the five week course.

Today was run a bit different and for the best, instead of all 12 at once I had one group at a time for 20-25 minutes in which time they had to animate and narrate their clip.

Below is the end result I hope you enjoy it, they were a great bunch of students to work with and they learnt, applied and achieved so much.

I love the fact that when we the student where making Scene three the student realised to make a good fire he needed to make multiple drawing of fires “like what we did with the panels on the robot, we will have to keep swapping them out”.

I love the fact that they were so confident in animating they even added little touches in the background look out for a rabbit in the forest, a mouse on the fire place, look out for the axe being raised as the wolf is chased.

I love the fact that while we were animating one of the boys parents came in to see him complete the work and told me “this is all he has been on about, these lessons, he tells me how different cartoons are made, he loves it, he has been showing everyone in family the other video helped make on the internet”.

How we did it. The course took place over five weeks.

Week one was Silhouette animation and cut out animation we looked at works by Lotte Reigner and watched Charlie and Lola respectively. We also animated a cut-out robot and built a Thaumatrope.

Week two was stop-frame animation we looked at Shaun the Sheep, Trap Door, Morph, Bob the Builder we also made egg box characters and animated them.

Week three was cel-frame animation we looked at Phineas and Ferb, compared first series Spongebob Sqaurepants (cel-frame) to later series 6 (cel shaded animation), we also made Zoetropes.

Week four we planned out the scenes for Red Riding Hood and made all the characters in the cut-out style and stored them together.

Week five we animated and narrated.

I then took all the footage and audio home and edited it and shazam! A masterpiece. It was a great project and I look forward to running simiar workshops with other schools in the future. Be sure to follow me on twitter @pixelh8

Today was the start of the students making their adaptation of “Little Red Riding Hood”. Some people may find it infuriating, but I found it amusing to find out that a huge change had been made in the way we were to make the animation. Originally as was the plan last week we were going to make 3D models of characters like we did in Week 2, however somewhere a long the line everyone had decided to change to cut-out animation and they did a fantastic job. (See picture)

Each group of students were given one of the four main scenes that makes up “Little red Riding Hood” to animate 1) Little Red Riding Hood leaving home, 2) Meeting the wolf, 3) Getting to the Grandothers House and 4) The Woodcutter scaring away the Wolf. I gave each group an image of the scene they were working on to remind them. Each individual student had a specific job, i.e. the background, making a wolf, or furniture in a scene. All the jobs were put on a list so everyone knew exactly what they were doing at every step and I could check their progress over the session.

They did it all, an impressive feat for a group of seven year olds (an impressive feat for any age), they made four scenes and all the objects that go in them ready to animate next week! Some really good work and I can’t wait to help them bring it to life. Next week it is all hands on deck as they need to both animate and narrate. I know they can do it, I just want them to be able to take their time, enjoy it and make work that they are proud of.

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).

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.