A year 7/8 class from Talbot Specialist School bought a Sheffield legend to life this term through animation and artwork. Lizzie the elephant was used by T W Ward and Co scrap metal dealers during the First World War, to replace horses that were conscripted by the military. The Talbot class brought to life a number of stories about Lizzie, using stop-motion animation.
The students worked really hard on the film, recording the voice-over, writing the titles, drawing the backgrounds and models, animating the stories, and finally editing the film. We were also very lucky to find the perfect soundtrack, a song called “Lizzie Wards Elephant” by a songwriter called Steve Birks (you can see his MySpace page here). He very kindly gave permission for the song to be used in the film.
For more information about Lizzie’s story, see the Sheffield Jungle page on the University website.
Two year 6 classes from Bradway School spent a full day each at the CLC to animate the traditional Japanese stories they had been learning about in class. The students had also being studying Manga comics, and each group created some fantastic 2D characters, props and sets for the animations. They were the most ambitious characters I’ve seen at the CLC, with a huge number of moving parts, with different eyes, mouths and profiles. I was very impressed with how the students managed to keep track of all the bits and use them to full effect in their films.
Once again the difficulties of animating enough action to match the scripts came to the fore. The problem partially lies in recording the voice-over separately, rather than straight onto the animation, but this isn’t really practical. However I think that any problems like this teach the pupils a lot, and they hopefully will be very aware of the issue for future animations.
Here are some of my favourites from the sessions (I just love the Windy Bride story!):
The year 1 class from St Thomas of Canterbury attended the CLC in two halves this past couple of weeks in order to animate the stories they had been learning in lessons. The first half animated The Gruffalo, each group taking one or scenes to work on. These were all put together at the end with the voiceover recorded in class. We used the software Zu3D, as it is very easy to use and primary friendly, with the ability to add titles and audio to the animation without having to export it into another application. The pupils worked really hard to get the animations completed in a morning, although we had the common problem of struggling to have enough action to fit the voice-over. This is where one of the Zu3D features is particularly useful – the frame rate slider means you can quickly reduce the number of frames per second, in order to slow the film down.
The Gruffalo
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The second half of the class animated a Funny Bones story which you can see below.
The Totley Primary Year 5s had a smashing time at the CLC yesterday, creating some eggcellent animations using painted hard-boiled eggs. Each group had written a story and built a set in a cardboard box for their egg characters. Unfortunately they only had a morning to complete their films, but they worked really hard and I was amazed at how much they got done – the finished films had titles and sound added, as you can see below. The biggest problem was getting the eggs to stand up, but they did make excellent characters for squishing.
Two year 3 classes from Carfield Primary School came to the CLC this term to animate their own short stories. Each group wrote a script, designed their set and brought toys and props to animate. They spent the morning using I Can Animate to create the animations, and the afternoon editing the films in Windows Movie Maker to add sound and titles.
The first class had developed some quite lengthy scripts and it soon became clear that their animations weren’t long enough to fit in all the speaking, so they had to cut out large parts. The second group therefore decided to create silent films, using only music and sound effects to enhance the action – unfortunately this meant the storyline was often unclear. The perfect balance is an action-driven story with very small amounts of narration/dialogue, and the use of titles to explain where necessary.
You can see some of the finished animations below:
Three classes from Mundella School have visited the CLC this term to create some animations. Two classes animated part of the story of The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, using some fantastic hand painted sets and props.
Mundella – Iron Man
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The third class had been learning about explorers, and created animations set in the Antarctic based on Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, again with some beautifully painted backdrops and penguins.
Two key stage 2 classes from Heritage Park have been studying the story of the The Iron Man by Ted Hughes as part of their Machines topic and came to the CLC to help bring it to life. In the first session the pupils created an animation of part of the story, using 2D painted backgrounds and characters. This worked particularly well as they had used split pins in the joints of the Iron Man, so that his arms and legs could move. The animations were also quite short and based on action rather than dialogue, which I find is always most effective.
The following week we looked at mechanical sounds and created a soundtrack for the animation. We used the iPads, in particular the Shaker app, and Garageband on the Apple Macs. This contains a large number of loops and sound effects. A couple of groups recorded their own sound effects too.
In the third session, I took our Lego Mindstorm Robots to the school, to do some programming. We look at simple programs to make the robots move forward, backwards, turn and stop. Then we investigated the sound and colour sensors, seeing how loud different sounds were, and what colours the robot could detect.
This term a year 7/8 class from Talbot Specialist School have been working at the CLC to create their own animated version of the story of Robin Hood. The class worked really well together, taking it in turns to take the pictures on the computer, move the characters, and boss everyone about as director. They had built the set and characters before they came to the CLC – the set was good and robust, but the characters struggled to stand unaided, so we filmed from above, with everything laid flat.
Whilst some students were busy animating, others recorded the voiceover using our mp3 recorders, and once the animating was completed we sat together as a group to decide on titles, music and editing. We hope you enjoy the final film!
Following on from the success of our Spanish Summer School last year, we ran a French one for 3 days in August, aimed at Year 5 and 6 students with no or little prior knowledge of the language – although there were a few who had already learnt much of what we covered.
Day 1
We covered Greetings, How you are and Names in the morning. Each pair of attendees had the use of an iPad, which we used initially as an expensive mini-whiteboard using the free app Doodle Buddy, to write answers on. Having used mini-whiteboards as a teacher, it soon became clear that the iPads have the advantage of being much cleaner and avoiding the problem of pens running out of ink all the time.
At the end of the morning, students then created a comic strip using all the language learnt, using the Strip Designer app on the iPad (which we called Pow! due to the icon used). This costs £1.79 but is worth it, as creating comic strips is really easy to do, using images from My Photos. The students used aliens for the characters in their strip, created using the Martian app. This is another free app to create your own alien, choosing colour, body shape, number of legs etc (ideal for teaching body parts!)
You can then take a screen shot of the finished martian (hold down the home and power button) which automatically goes into My Photos. I also used this app to create a unique lock screen for each iPad so the students knew which was theirs for the week.
Once these had been finished the attendees recorded a short piece of French on mp3 recorders to add to a Voki, using French names picked from a list rather than their own. Some of them used Audacity to edit their voice. Unfortunately I’ve not managed to embed the results here.
After lunch we looked at some French-speaking countries and how to say where you lived. Everyone then used Animoto to create a short slideshow about a country.
Unfortunately this was quite a frustrating day with regard to the technology, as our broadband connection was running very slowly and some Vokis were lost when the website froze. Other computers wouldn’t connect to the network or kept crashing, and by the end of the day I remembered why a lot of teachers don’t use computers in the classroom. Still it was worth it in the end.
Day 2
In the morning we did colours and because some students had already learnt them I did a bit on adjectival agreement too, in order for them to create a poster using the Moodboard Lite app (free) with French sentences describing images found on the internet. The Moodboard app was created for designers, artists etc but I liked it for the colours posters because one of the features was the ability to create a colour palette. The students used the Collins French dictionary app to look up any words they didn’t know. This was the £5.99 version, and although there was a cheaper one, this had a good balance of detail in the entries whilst still being simple enough for learners of this age.
I’ve always noticed that children find it difficult to use a dictionary properly for a foreign language and so I spent a little time talking them through the process and explaining what some of the abbreviations meant. The novelty of the iPads certainly seemed to motivate them more than using a paper version.
The rest of the morning was spent learning numbers 1-20, and we used the noughts and crosses background in Doodle Buddy to play bingo. Each child then planned a short stop-motion animation using some of the language learnt so far, using plasticine for characters and I Can Animate software.
Bon amies
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the bush
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A Day at the Zoo
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Day 3
The students spent the morning editing their animations using Windows Movie Maker, adding voiceovers and titles.
We then covered some basic weather vocabulary with the aim of creating weather forecasts in front of the green screen. Unfortunately we were running out of time so I gave the attendees the choice of how to create their weather-based presentations – using Voki, Animoto, Strip Designer, or filming it and editing in Windows Movie Maker. The groups that filmed their weather forecast used the free app iPrompt Pro as a scrolling script to read from on the iPads. It is a little complicated to use, as you have to fiddle with the settings to get the script to scroll slowly enough, but worth it to avoid the children clutching a bits of paper, and typing in the script reinforced the language.
La Meteo
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Weather forecast
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All of the work created over the 3 days was eventually uploaded to our French Summer School blog, which was set up using Posterous. I still really like this platform as it is so simple to use, and presents the work really nicely (for example multiple photos get put into a gallery).
In all it was a very successful 3 days. I was really pleased with how well the iPads worked aspart of the classroom-type activities. Originally I had seen them very much as something students would use for reference and for passive skills (i.e. reading/listening), but there are enough free/cheap apps out there for creating work too, although we didn’t do any audio recording directly on the iPads. I shall try to do a separate post detailing all of the useful apps I found for MFL work.
One last issue presented itself with the iPads, and that was transferring all of the images of the work the students did onto my computer. The photos don’t get synched through iTunes, but when you plug the iPad in, the PC sees it as a camera, and if you double click on the icon that appears in My Computer you can see all of the photos saved on the device and transfer them as you wish.
This is my second animation summer school at the CLC and I decided I wanted to push the participants a bit further, away from the 20 second claymation towards a more creative animation, hence the name “Beyond Plasticine”. Unfortunately we only had two attendees on the summer school, possibly due to the higher age limit this year (12+), but it was still a worthwhile 3 days.
I began by showing them some examples of animation using photos, people, post it notes, t-shirt etcs, to get them thinking. Examples:
The two lads then spent the rest of the morning talking about what kind of animation they wanted to do and planning the storyline. They came up with a really good idea to animate a Nintendo DS game and have the characters escape the console and chase after them both. At this point it became clear that plasticine was the best way to go for the characters, so I allowed a bit of modelling.
It was really hard work getting a finished storyboard from the pair, as they had ideas in their heads but preferred to talk through it than get it down on paper. In the end we compromised and they storyboarded sections, then animated those sections, to break up the process a bit.
They were also given plenty of breaks to help ensure they remained focussed up to the end of the day, as it is such painstaking work. One of the pair had previously done a lot of lego animation, using a still camera, so he was very good at envisaging the action and knowing how to move the characters, props and camera (though I helped with the latter).
Once all the animation was completed, they each created their own version of the film in Adobe Premiere Pro (required to get the DS game in the right place) and Windows Movie Maker. The finished masterpieces can be seen below:
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