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.

It was also nice to see some of my former students and see how they are progressing as designers and their keeness to point out their use of sound in their new creations. More info on the event can be found here and here with details of the winners.

I wish them all the best and look forward to working with them in the future.

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).

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.

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.

A lot of you may have noticed I have moved away from being “Pixelh8″, I still am “Pixelh8″ I am just more interested in promoting, facilitating and helping others be creative, I have always done this, it is just my main focus now. Whether it be making or performing music, designing or programming games or creating stop frame animation. 2012 is going to be about helping others create. There are two reasons for this;

1) I have had five years of fun, making and promoting myself as Pixelh8 it would be nice to now help others.

2) I am starting my PhD in “Educational Music Technology” all my research will be focused on helping to get others involved in music performance and creation.

There are already some great events I am booked for in 2012, Games Britania a game making festival in Rotherham which is building year on year, HESFES home educating festival where i’ll be designing games in a field, BACON a two day technology conference, British Museum workshops, St. Albans game design week, Young Rewired State 2012 and working with IP1 and The Mix to deliver so unique music making workshops. Don’t panic if I have missed anything. The full list albeit amazing is quite long indeed.

This doesn’t include the two patents, several conferences, maybe another published paper, being in a book about music, making all of my existing iPhone Apps HD for the iPad, “OCARBOT 2″ and “Cross-side” for iPhone, helping my ex-degree students publish some XBOX 360 games, jumping out an airplane and sending something else into space. 2012 will be busy.

Of course this is just the “plan” things will change. “OCARBOT EDU” has been slightly delayed to fix a few things here and there; try and trim the 134MB distribution size, allow myself a chance to recharge my batteries and to play on some new games and software over christmas.

Hopefully I’ll bump in to you in 2012 either in real life or on twitter, @pixelh8. Either way I hope 2011 was good for you and that 2012 will be even better. If you need me for anything just drop me a line.

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.

It was quite apparent upon my arrival at the school that things had moved on a bit since I attended there circa 1993, long gone were the 286′s and RM machines. All the staff had pretty much been replaced too.

Today I had a huge class of 28 students much larger than my normal game workshop, but that is fine as we had lots to do and I divided them in to eight groups. I had four hours with them today, so the work had to be fast and furious, luckily the students were “fired up” as the ICT Carol Skeates put it, and they were able to get on with it and quick too.

I took them through the history of platform games and about some of the work I had done, then on to their designs on paper, then on computer, they even designed a DVD case for their game too!

All the graphics and level designs are now done (see Level Editor in picture), so it is just up to me to compile and test it and deliver it to them on Friday.

They were a great bunch of students who produced a high standard of work and I suspect quite a few might be interested in getting in to games development and taking what they have learned further. It was also nice to do the workshop at Chantry High School, I know I would have loved to do stuff like this when I was a student there, it just didn’t really exist then. Thanks to Carol Skeates and Mr Andrew Fell for letting me come by and run the workshop.