Art of Animation and Storytelling: Chalkboard Animation
The chalkboard animation learnt over the past days had some in-depth learning outcomes for these curious and motivated young learners:
- Gaining an understanding of the frame by frame animation process
- Making things move in different ways through play and experimentation.
- To use and put into practice some of the basic principles of animation.
- To attempt some characterization and storytelling.
- To become familiar with the advantage and disadvantages of ‘straight-ahead’
The Great Zoetrope :
Here’s yet another pre-film animation device students learnt to make.
A Zoetrope is a device that produces the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion as seen in the picture above
Collaborative group project:
Today being the last day of this workshop, kids were going to learn how to put all their little chalkboard animations together into a single animation which would be around a minute long. Students were shown some animation examples from the previous class to get their creativity and imagination flowing. Followed by this, they worked individually to create their name using cardboard letter cut outs. This was done to add their credits towards the end of the animation film.
Next,they then had to collaborate to work on the title of the animation. Students brainstormed on some titles that could go with the theme. Since the theme was ‘Nature,’ they came up with the title, ‘Nature Friends’. The highlight of the presentation was also adding sound to the movie. Students had the option of either singing together or adding some vocally produced sound effects. Although they were a little shy to begin with, they did a great job of participating in creating this vocal fusion. Seen below, students having fun compiling their theme song. All in all, it was a great learning experience for these young animators. Creativity, collaboration, risk-taking and imagination were seen at its best!