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Animation and Filmaking

Posted on February 14, 2008
Filed Under Activity, Free | 4 Comments

We have been stuck in this week (new puppy!) so the children have been making an animation. We made one some time ago by drawing a background picture (the sea) and taking still pictures of the drawn and cut out characters (fish) which we moved a fraction each time. When we strung the pictures together then we had a movie! This time we are using playmobil to create a 3D movie – again taking stills and moving the models a little each time. The children have enjoyed planning the action, and watching their results.

We don’t have very sophisticated equipment. We have an old video camera, and by turning record on and off again quickly we get lots of stills that can be played together. The same effect could be achieved by taking digital pictures and stringing them together using a free copy of Irfanview. I did a test and found if I made a slideshow (setting the automatic slide advancement to 0.003 seconds) it gave quite a smooth transition through the pictures. There is an article on this with an example on the PC World news site (although I used Jpeg files not GIF).

So no specialist equipment (except a digital camera) or software is required – and if the camera was held steady by a tripod, then even smaller children could manage. There are so many applications of this – here are some ideas I came up with -

Make a drawing come to life.
Use a book or story you are enjoying, and make a movie of it.
If you are making models for a project (eg. Egyptian pyramids) why not use them in an animation (eg. act out a day in the life of an Egyptian).
Make an animation of an historical event. Or what about a volcano erupting.
Get the children to make a ‘day in the life’ film about themselves.
Get the children to make a film of some issue they feel strongly about – take inspiration from Different Take Films in which a group of home-educated children made a film about home-education.
Make a nature program. We have made a few using plastic animals with one of the children commentating.
Make a movie based on a script written by the children

There are two good videos available on Teachers TV about creating animations with children (free download you have to register).

Comments

4 Responses to “Animation and Filmaking”

CJ on February 18th, 2008

Hi Julie,

Yet another fantastic post!

It’s perfect timing too as my eldest has been making mini movies with a mobile phone using lego people as lead characters.

Lots of good resources to look up

How’s it going with the puppy?

CJ x
The Homeschool Blog Awards » Carnival of Homeschooling: One Room Schoolhouse Edition at the HSBA! on February 19th, 2008

[...] Animation and Filmmaking ~ HE [...]
Patricia on February 20th, 2008

Thank you for this post. My son spends a lot of time making stop action films with Stikfas and his digital camera. I know he will be interested in some of the sites/programs you have listed.
admin on February 20th, 2008

Hi CJ and Patricia – thanks for commenting. We have had a lot of fun with Shapeshifter since I wrote the post. Tomorow we are going to try to make a zoetrope from http://www.groeg.de/puzzles/zoetrope.html
best wishes, Julie.