Marija's animation

Continuing in our series of procedural writing about our animations, today Marija is going to share her piece...

Animations

Animations are like mini movies with mini people only you need a normal camera to take little pictures . Then ,when you put them all together....BAM! You have an animation! We made animations about camp. 

So first we decided what camp activity we were going to do, then we made a background and painted it lots of colours! After that, we started to make our mini people! 

We drew our mini people and put them in our AWESOME ANIMATIONS! Each of us took 10 to 20 pictures before we started to move our mini people. 

When we finally finished, we uploaded the animations onto the computer, saved them as movies, and we all had fun watching them when our parents came! 

Ella's animation writing

Today Ella is going to share her piece of writing about how we made our animations...

How to make animation

Animation is lots of individual photos joint together in chronological order to make movement. The animation I’m going to talk about is 2D, we made ours in room 8 about our school camp

Firstly you need to plan what your going to do on a A3 piece of paper then you neatly draw  your background on a A1 sized piece of paper. After that you paint your background with a fat brush first then a skinny brush to do the detail. Soon after the paint has dried put in extra details with pastel.

Next you need to make a person out of paper (that person being you). To make that paper person you need to draw all the different joints including your body and head. Before cutting the bits out you will need to draw your face and clothes. Once you’ve finished that you need to inky/sharpie your person and colour him/her in. Then cut out the pieces and use bluetac to stick him/her together. Why do you need to use bluetac? Because if you use glue or tape your person won’t able to move!

Later, if you need props draw them, inky them and then lastly colour them!

Afterwards, set up a special place for your background so you can only see the background and nothing else. Set up your people and props in the right spot ready to film. To start you need to take 10-20 pictures without moving your person because you don’t want to go straight into the action that would ruin it. Start to move your people in small movements and take a photo after every movement.

When you’ve taken about 100-200 photos, you upload your pictures onto a computer and put them together on a movie editing program. If there are any unwanted pictures that you’ve taken now’s the chance to remove them. After that you will need to add in credits and titles, and if you want any you can put in music and sound effects. Last but not least save it as a movie in a folder so it won’t get lost.

I felt good about my movie because it turned out really well. Making it gave me an opportunity to film and makes an animation which made me feel great. If I we’re you and you hadn’t done this I’d probably have a go!

Writing about animation

We have been learning about procedural writing in Room 8 and using our learning to write about creating our animations. We looked at other examples, analysed what we needed to put into our writing and then created our own piece of procedural writing to describe our animation process. We will be sharing some of these pieces. To start us off Viola shares her piece of writing...

Artistic animation

What is animation? Its lots of pictures, a movie, heaps of hard work and definitely lots of fun! This is how a 2D animation is made.

This animation is about our camp experiences. Firstly we planned all the things we wanted. Then we drew our back ground on an A1 piece of paper. After drawing we painted and pasteled the background for detail.

Meanwhile, we made our paper people and coloured them. We stuck our people together with blue–tack so we could move them, twist them and turn them into different positions. Then we made any other props we might need.

After all that preparation, we set up our background, people and camera ready to film. This is how you do it: first you take 10- 20 pictures without moving your people. This creates a pause at the start of your movie. Then you move your person a tiny amount and take one picture between each movement. We carried this on until we had about 100-200 pictures.

Lastly we uploaded our pictures onto a movie editing program. This made the pictures flow together like a real movie. We removed any unwanted pictures and added in all the titles, credits, music and sound effects. Finally we saved it as our very own movie! 

I felt like a star as everyone watched my little movie at the world premier and knew I had to do it again. I hope you will enjoy making your own movie as well.

Amazing Animations

Our animations about camp are finished and we held our world premier in class this afternoon. Now it is your turn to get to watch them, we hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed making them and as always we would love to hear your comments.

Raft Building

The Mudslide

The Muddy Challenge

Kayaking

The Hydroslide

The Flying Fox

The Burma Trail

The Flying Fox

Claymation

Room 8 have a had go at claymation after our success with the pipe cleaner creations. We each created a little creature out of plastercine (complete with googly eyes!) Then in groups of six we worked to make them come to life. As with the pipe cleaner creations we had to take lots of photos as we needed at least ten to make a second of film. Mrs Davies then put the movies together and added some music.

We are now working on our camp animations, these will take a little while but we will share when they are done so keep checking back. In the meantime we hope you enjoy the claymation and as always we'd love to hear your comments.

Strange creatures discovered in Room 8

Some rather interesting little creatures have been appearing in Room 8...
I wonder what they are up to?

Animating at home

Dion and James have been trying out their animation skills at home. Dion decided to create an action movie about a fire using his lego and James thought he would bring his camera and a battery charger to life. They both did this without any help and I think you'll agree the results are pretty impressive.

Pipe Cleaner Animation

Room 8 explain how they made their pipe cleaner animation.

On Tuesday we made some amazing animations with pipe cleaners. First we needed to craft our fantastic creatures. We twisted and turned the pipe cleaners to make their bodies. We then got into groups and planned what our creations would do. We set them up in the starting pose and then using a camera on a tripod we took five pictures. These pictures gave us a rest before the action started. After that we moved the creatures a little amount and then took another picture. We repeated this procedure 80 to 100 times.

 

Next we had to take the pictures from the camera onto the computer. We used a movie making piece of software to run one after another. We wanted the pictures to run at 10 frames per second. This made the creatures look like they were moving.

We hope you enjoy it.

Making human caterpillars!

We decided to have another go at animating ourselves today and Mrs Davies helped us to get a little more organised. We got into two lines and the front person led us around in small steps. After each step we took a picture and then put them altogether to make our new movie. We were surprised that our 69 photographs became only 6 seconds of movie when we put it together, we worked out that this means that about 11 pictures makes one second of film.


We've put our new film below for you to enjoy. Next week we are going to try animating characters we have made out of pipe cleaners so do check back to see how they turn out.

Animating ourselves

We have learnt that animations are made up of thousands of pictures that are slightly different to each other. Normally this is done by drawing or on a computer but we discovered today that we can animate ourselves in the same way. By taking small movements between photographs we can make ourselves move in cool ways that we wouldn't be able to do in real life. Mrs Davies showed us a music video by the band Ok Go where they use this technique to create interesting movements and then we had a go ourselves. Below are the Ok Go video and then our attempts. We might ave another go tomorrow to see if we can get even better at it!

(Ok Go - End of Love)

Animation

This term we are learning about animation, what it is and how it is made. We have found out that animations are made up of lots of pictures, each with a small difference to the one before. When these are played quickly our brains are tricked into thinking the pictures are moving. 


To explore this idea we made some little flip books. A flip book is made up of lots of little pictures which the watcher flips through to watch the animation. Flip books have been around since 1868 when John Barnes Linnett created his kineograph (kine meaning movement and graph meaning picture). Our little flip books have two pictures and you roll the top picture back and forth across the bottom picture to see the movement. It was important to make sure the changes we made to our pictures were only small so that our brain would be tricked.


Mrs Davies has made a little video of some of our flip books so you can see how they turned out.