The finished films from E2BN Day one

Four shorts edited together, made in just 2 x 1.5 hour sessions during the excellent E2BN conference. The groups all decided to work with nursery rhymes and adapt traditional ideas.

I love the way the mouse eats his cheese.

Animating a wave

Animating the mouse's arm for a wave you can see that the moves aren't very small.

More Fuzzy Felt animation and MFLs

The idea of animating Fuzzy Felt seems to appeal to all age groups. These animated shorts were made in under 90 minutes by teachers at the eTwinning conference held in Nottingham over the weekend. Participants loved the "Out of the Box' simplicity of it and the fact that it can be instant.

The aim of the session was to introduce teachers to some advanced techniques so we used Fuzzy felt characters on a green screen and using I can animate we keyed out the green screen and replaced it with a photo. Simple but very quick. Would love to be able to add a movie clip instead of a photo and animate over a video clip.

The tricky part is the lighting if there are shadows it doesn't quite work and the venue was basically a very smart greenhouse so there were lots of shadows and too much light. That's why you get that grainy effect on the animation

When having ago at green screening make sure you have an even light with few shadows.

You can use a big sheet of green paper from your art department, doesn't need to be expensive green screens.

Winking and Blinking with Stop Motion Animation

This short extract was made today on the advanced animation course for teachers as part of the software demo in just 10 minutes. I wanted to show the participants simple and effective methods for getting your models to wink and blink easily. Great for reacting to action.

Animation broadcast for Glow

On Friday I flew to Glasgow to work with P5 and P6's at Highdykes Primary School in Dumbarton. The animation demonstration broadcast was for Glow, part of Learning and Teaching Scotland. 

It was a small experienced group of four animators, who had been studying a poem called Tam O"Shanter by Robert Burns. This year is his 250 birthday, so he's well established as a poet! And as part of Scotland's home coming celebrations, LTS wanted to use Glow to broadcast to schools all over Scotland two simple animation sessions for students and teachers to watch and follow.

The 90 minute animation session was filmed using 3 cameras and a feed from my laptop and broadcast live via Glow to schools all over Scotland.

Students and teachers could watch and follow the animated activity as well as ask questions via Glow.

We chose a short extract from the poem and made the models and set before the broadcast begun.

Below is the animation made by the students in Just 90 minutes while being filmed live!