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!

Animation with art teachers

A few animations made at Eagle House school this week during an animation INSET day for art teachers. They made their models so quickly! And they were all excellent, notice the simple scenery in the films, again made extremely fast, with paper, chalk and blue tac.

The scenery doesn't need to be great, just enough to give us a sense of location. So don't spend ages on fantastic designs and art work, invest that time in creating engaging stories.

This first film I like lots, simple and easy to follow, visual story telling. We just ran out of time to add more sound effects. The more sounds the better. The scenery here is made from a card board box with, maker pens.

In this film, there is a lot of copy and pasting of the frames. Which is a great trick to make a scene last a little longer.

The simple back ground in this short, makes it easy to follow the action.

Animation with year 1 at Mayflower Primary, Tower Hamlets

Two shorts films based on the same story created by year one students at the Mayflower Primary School, in East London yesterday.

The year 1 students have been working with artist Maria Amidu since the beginning of term on the topic of Toys. This has included a trip to a museum, a toy shop (Hamleys) creating their own toys with Shrinkles and papier mache, drawing maps of their adventures with a beginning, middle and end. Reading stories about a naughty bus and other toys and creating their own original story based on all their discoveries.

This story was then turned into two animation shorts, we used all the art work that had been created, busses and robots, their story map was used as the back drop.

Enjoy.