animation workshops

'm back. The project I've been working on for the last week was organising and running some workshops for pupils at Churchtown Primary School in Southport as part of an Arts Week.

There are thirty pupils in each class, and although the school is far better equipped than many others (with Apple Mac computers rather than PCs - hurrah!), lack of time and space made the workshops particularly difficult. Nevertheless, the pupils were all enthusiastic (verging on boisterous, but that's OK - it was the end of an exciting activity-filled week) as well as polite and well-behaved, and the staff were all welcoming and helpful, so it was a pleasure to work there.

Two Year 3 classes used Comic Life, a programme to create comics from drawings and photographs, and three Year 6 classes used iPhoto and iMovie (two parts of iLife which comes as standard with Mac computers) to create slideshows and stop-motion animation.

I based all of the activities around photographs I'd taken on the envoronment, the theme of the Arts Week, and the pupils seemed suprised that they were my images rather than downloaded from the Internet.

The image of Chloe the cat seemed particularly popular. Many of the younger children added speech bubbles, while a lot of the older ones added transformations that made him look even fatter than he already is. One girl apologised profusely when a transformation between two images got stuck part way through, substituting the top of foxglove for the top of the cat's head.

The only element I failed to get across to the pupils, despite repeating it many times, was how little movement is required between frames of an animation. I'll have to think about how to improve this next time. Still, they all seemed to enjoy it and soon got the grasp of the software, so they should be able to make further attempts another time.

Tags: Churchtown | primary | school | stopmotion | animation