Animation

Today I created a short animation with one other member of my class. We had previously decided on our cross curricular topic of healthy living. We knew we would be creating a movie on healthy eating later in the elective so, decided to use exercise as our focus for the animation. We wanted to keep it simple as we had less than three hours to create the story, character, to film, edit, add sound and text and upload to YouTube. We decided to use the character of a bear and make an exercise video. Before the class I was a little apprehensive as I had attempted an animation in B.Ed1 which had been unsuccessful. I think this was down to time restrictions and then in our one last push to finish we ended up losing some of our scenes. This time, however, everything worked out well. I was conscious of the time so stayed focused and kept it simple. We used Digital Blue to create our movie. The equipment is easy to use and I would feel confident using it with a class. We quickly remembered the basics to filming and worked through the different stages of our exercise video. We wanted to use a specific song for the animation which we found on YouTube. We then used Fetch to convert the track into MP3 file format. We tried to add our track to Digital Blue but were unable to do so and had to move over to Windows Movie Maker. Although this was slightly irritating at the time I am pleased now as I can use both programmes. We added our track finding the section we wanted to use and fading the music in/out to sound more professional. Finally we added text and uploaded our animation onto YouTube. It was a proud moment.

The task was supposed to be collaborative where we would write the script then pass it onto the next group, who would create the characters and so on until the story came back to the original group to film. I think this is a good idea and would definitely use it with a class, but am glad we did not have to do that today. I do not think we had enough time to do this all in one session and would not have had the opportunity to get to know the programmes. If I were to use this with a class I would split it up into different lessons, so the story boarding would be one, designing the characters would be the next...

All in all I really enjoyed today and am looking forward to using my new found skills in my teaching practice.

See animation below.