Animation Club - update

The last meeting of the Animation Club, before the holidays, took place this week. Children were a bit excitable with all their preparations for Christmas but got stuck into their PowerPoint animations. They needed little help from me. The additional things I showed them revolved around making their presentation auto-run by removing mouse-clicks within and between slides.

The most impressive animation involved a dragon shooting out fire at a hut in the woods. The hut then caught fire and the flames grew larger.

They were also keen to add sound. I brought along a number of sound effects and a TASCAM voice recorder. The school's headphones, with built in microphones, had obviously taken a hammering over the years and were not all in working condition. What was interesting was how keen and motivated pupils were to write a script to record on the TASCAM and to put expression into their recordings. 

We ran out of time to transfer all of the recordings to their PCs but the potential was obvious.

The power of ANIMATION is universal.

After the holiday, it will be Pivot Stick Figure for one or two weeks before really getting down to the hard work - proper stop-go animation*. How they'll respond to the self-discipline needed to produce animations of quality will be fun to watch.

* This reminds me - where am I getting webcams from, what software is available, where do we store all the sets and materials. Headache coming on.