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.

Antarctica Videos

The first of our Antarctica documentary videos are done and online for you to enjoy. We have learnt that Antarctica is a very special place and we loved finding out about the amazing creatures that call Antarctica home. It was also a lot of fun making our films.


We hope you find them interesting and would love to hear your comments. You can find them on our Antarctica page (Click here to go straight to our videos!).

Busy Budgies

Room 8 have two resident budgies, Belle and Sebastian. Here's a little time-lapse video Mrs Davies took to show just what busy budgies they are!

Ormie the Pig

We have been starting to think about our trip to camp at the end of the term. Marija tells us about a video we watched in class today about a little pig called Ormie and how he teaches us about one of the skills we need to be successful...

Ormie the pig is a pink, chubby guy that sees a fridge. On top of that fridge was a cookie jar filled with cookies. Ormie wanted it really bad, so he tried many things to get them but all of them failed. We watched Ormie because we are going to camp very soon. He was very determined to get those cookies and in the end he won, he got them! I think another way Ormie could have gotten the cookies was to use the toilet plungers up the side of the fridge instead of the front.

We have pasted a link to Ormie below so you can watch him for yourself. We are all hoping to show as much perseverance as Ormie does when we head off to camp in four weeks time.