Cherry Tree Primary School Pollution Animation – Class 7

Matt has been working at the Cherry Tree Primary School & Speech and Language Centre in Colchester working with a group of young people with Speech and Language challenges.

The challenge was to create a stop frame animation which told a story about pollution. Matt worked with the class teacher and learners to talk about the effects of pollution before introducing the young people to video and animation technologies. The group did some research, drew up a storyboard and then produced the below animation, which was filmed in both 2D and 3D.

The group of learners had to practice their communication, co-ordination, collaboration and creative skills in order to produce the animation, which was entirely their own creative ideas. Big thanks to Janet Livingstone, class teacher, and Miss M for their brilliant approach to the project.

Kate Holland, Deputy Head Says:
February 12th, 2011 at 7:54 pm
This is just brilliant and the children are so proud of their work. Well done Matt some inspirational work! Anything is possible if you can inspire!

Salhouse Primary School Animations – The Secret Door

Work began today at the Salhouse Primary School to create the ‘Secret Door’ animations. Each group were taught the basics of animation and left to let their imaginations run wild as they created their project animations.

Some images from the day:

Sunnymede County Junior School Animations

Hal and Matt have spent the past two days at Sunnymede County Junior School running clay stop frame animation sessions. The young people at this school are really creative and are really proud of their achievements.

Some images from the two days:

Salhouse Primary School Filming

Shelley and Matt have been spending time with Salhouse Primary School (Salhouse, Norwich) to produce films for a Creative Partnerships project they have been involved in. The learners have learned about television production, and begun to shoot their own film about “The Secret Door”.

Some images from the event:

Darrick Wood Junior School Animations

Hal and Matt have been spending the last few weeks working with Darrick Wood Junior School to test a new learning platform. As a thank you for the time and testing Matt and Hal ran a clay animation session, which the learners enjoyed so much they sent us some thank you cards:

BBC Wales 2W Christmas Idents by Six Year Olds from Caerleon Infant School

The 14th, 15th and 16th of November now stand out as some of the best days in my career so far. We’ve worked long and hard to persue governments, broadcasters and education institutions to promote the fact that children are very creative when united with the power of enabling technologies.

BBC Wales initiated a pilot project to find out what idents could look like if Children created idents themselves, using stop frame clay animation.

I spent last Wednesday (8 November) at BBC Broadcasting House in Cardiff working with various team members from 2W to work out how the technology being used could be enabled for 16:9 (widescreen) viewing. To the right is how the ident will be placed on the work created by the children. We have decided to use Apple Computers running iStopMotion animation software and Sony XM1 camera technology. All of the work will be created in widescreen, our experiment worked. It has been decided that the background the children will animate in front of will be yellow, music will also be added in post production.So how would a six year old make an ident anyway?

Geraint Lang from the team and myself spent three enjoyable days at Caerleon Infant School near Newport, Wales, with Susan Wood and her team from BBC Wales. The demountable classroom had been tranformed for the event which would see young people creating the idents for BBC 2W (the Welsh version of BBC 2 in Wales).

Geraint and I spent the Tuesday afternoon with the group of thirty young people talking to them about animation and what the challenge was that they had been set.

On Wednesday and Thursday we took the now split group of children (15 per day) forward providing them with the clay, technology (computers and cameras) and backdrop to generate their animations.

Over the three day period the young people were challenged to make a 12 second animation in clay on a yellow background, the title they were challenged to make was ‘What Christmas means to me’. Snowmen, Father Christmas, Sledges, Presents and even Santa in the Bath were all created and constructed.

The music for the animations, which is rumoured to be ‘Jingle Bells’ will be recorded at a nearby Secondary School. The animations will hopefully be a part of the Christmas schedule for BBC 2W, the background of programme announcements.

Some images from the event:

Here are final animations as they were broadcast on BBC 2:

And here is the programme the BBC made about our work:

Cressing Primary School (Key Stage 1) Clay Animation with Six Year Olds

Hal MacLean and Matthew Eaves from the team spent the day with Class 2 at Cressing Primary School to undertake some experimental research into clay animation with six year olds. Mrs Harris and her classroom assistants were a great help throughout the day as fourteen six year old pupils took part.

Click the above images to enlarge them.

The objective of the day was to find out how six year olds coped with an animation task, learning the skills of model making, story construction and then using computers and digital video camera equipment to animate their story.

The session was the pilot for a larger project which will be held in Cardiff next month, which we will post more about here at digitalcreativity.org when the time comes.

Hal and myself will be writing a paper on our findings. The learning from this experiment has already changed our plans for BBC Wales.

Everyone involved in the project will recieve their creative work on DVD, created using iDVD, here is a screenshot of the DVD in production:

(Click image to enlarge)

We would like to thank Sue Giles, Head Teacher at the school for welcoming us into the school at such short notice.

Here are the files created on the day:

White Court School Students get creative at Ultralab in the first 30 minute film school

We experimented with a ‘One Hour Film School’ assisted by children from White Court School in Braintree, Essex.

The plan was to find out if it was possible to teach how to use Apple’s iMovie software and Canon cameras in 30 minutes and for the children to then make a film without any adult help in a further 30 minutes. It worked, and here are the 30 second films, completely planned and made by the children.

The lessons learnt from the pilot activity went forward to create the hour and a half training sessions for all future Summer School events.

Team:
Colin Elsey (Ultralab (1990 - 2006))
Matthew Eaves (Ultralab (1990 - 2006))
Alice Mitchell (Ultralab (1990 - 2006))
Richard (Ultralab (1990 - 2006))
George Variopoulos (Ultralab (1990 - 2006))

The finished films are called ‘Watch Top of the Pops’, ‘Wonder Water’, ‘The Mummy Returns’ and ‘Friends’, here they are:

Wonder Water
Watch Top of the Pops
The Mummy Returns
Friends