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 last session for group 2; they were a group of 12 year 3′s (7 year olds), six boys and six girls.

They did really well, in five sessions (approx 10 hours total) they were able to take a game from concept to complete game. 12 games in total were made.

I got there early today and had the completed games loaded up on the computers ready for them to play. It was wonderful to see them come in the room to discover their game had been compiled and was ready to play on. I let them play on the games that eachother had made and it was really good to hear them compliment one another on their work.

They were a wonderful group, it is still hard to believe they were seven when you think about how much they achieved (sketching the concept, writing the story, drawing the graphics, doing the level design, designing the box and even a short instruction manual).

It was nice to see that when I asked them who wanted to go on to make games as a job 8 out of 12 raise their hands, 5 boys and 3 girls which is fantastic. Five weeks a go they never thought they could even make a game and now their games will be presented to them in an achievement assembly in front of the whole school.

I am not sure of the exact numbers I’ll have to check it but I think I have now taught around 600 hundred kids to make games, by this estimate and by the time I get to Games Brittania in July I will be teaching my 1000th game designer! Be sure to check out the website as I will be running courses for both teachers and students to get involved in making games.

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).

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.

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.

Today was the last of this groups game design sessions, with the group of  “future game designers”.

I have to say this first before I move on to the rest of the blog, they were an excellent group and it was a real privilege to work with them over a extended period of time.

Today was just inputting the rest of the level designs in to the game engine and finishing the game boxes (see picture), although they didn’t get to play on the game, they did get to see what it looks like on a huge screen. The game will be presented to them on CD tomorrow morning in assembly and I hope they feel proud of what they have acheived when they collect them.

We also had a long discussion about the project as a whole; what they liked, what they didn’t, what could be improved over time. I explained to them, that the only difference between what they did in these sessions and what professional game makers do, is have more time. They had 10 hours in total to create a concept, design it and create it as well as consider the marketing behind it.  I then went on to explain that 10 hours is something that a professional game maker may spend on creating a tiny element in a game like a layout of an options screen. The other factor I got them to consider was they were working alone on this project (except for one pair), in some major games there are hundreds of  people involved, designers programmers, designers, musicians, marketing. They were year 6 students and they made a whole game in 10 hours.

I hope more than anything, they have gained confidence from these sessions, this is another thing they “can do”, this “is” an option for them in their future. There are so many great game companies in the UK I know some of these students are destined to be their future designers.

Another good session with the students from Springfield Junior School today. It was the day they got to see their game come to life inside the games engine and input the level design. One by one they took turns inputting the objects into the game map while the others designed their DVD case for their games (see picture, “Spark World”) just one of twelve platform games made during these sessions.

It was probably a combination of seeing their game characters move around and it drawing ever closer to christmas that had them all excited, but still they all maintained their ability to focus and pull off some amazing work.

One student remarked that these sessions were unlike normal ICT sessions and were “cooler and more fun” and as a class we reflected on this noting that all the skills we were using in these sessions were actually “borrowed” from other lessons; Physics to control the character and the gravity, English to write the story and keep a diary, Art to design the characters, Physical Education even helped in establishing rules of play. It goes on, and it turns out the things they learned in the other ICT lessons were just as important as it allowed them to know how save things in the correct format and to be confident in using a computer. I am very pleased how much they are learning and how much they are able to vocalise what they have learned and even disect it like we did today.

The other discussion that followed was another one about skills with some students suggesting they are better at ideas or art or using computers, so we discussed if they would like to do the sessions again in the future but all as one group working on the same game. Running the sessions like a big game studio with each student in a specific role. Again it was interesting to see them jump at the chance of delegating and discussing what roles they could have in the new game company as well as suggesting ideas like doing research in the playground to help decide what kind of games should be made.

I always end the session with them writing in their “Game Design Diary” and reiterating what we’ve done and what we are going to do next week.

Next week we are simply going to play on the game and review the whole process. I am hopefully gonna do some audio recordings next week  of their experiences and edit it together with footage of their games and pictures of their work, so they also have a video to remind them of just how much they have achieved over these five sessions.

Session 3 of the Game project was all about the graphics, taking them from the sketches and drawing them into the graphics software I have developed for retro style games. Drawing out the “Good Guy”, “Bad Guy”,” Item” and “Platform” as well as the background  in a separate editor all ready to be put in and tested in the game engine next week.

The students began to realise the value of making them draw several sketches of their characters and their respective worlds when they began “reducing them” in to 64X64 pixel sprites. It is really good doing a project over several weeks with a group of students, seeing how the develop their ideas over time instead of within a short one day session.

As always the students were friendly, polite and most important inquisitive, I think they are beginning to look at the games they play and think, “I can do that”.