According to the Moving Image Education website, “Animation ‘breathes life into something that wouldn’t normally move’.” Today we were challenged with creating a stop-motion animation to tell part of a story.
I was soon inspired with thoughts of Wallace and Gromit-style plasticine models. My expectations were quickly altered as I watched a series of tutorials and discovered the time and skill that it takes to produce something of the sort.
Rather than simply being a beginners’ sort of movie-making, animation is an art in its own right. There are five different types of animation, which serve different purposes: cutout, stop-motion model, pixillation, drawn and computer animations (Moving Image Education).
We found that the simplest to create was cutout animation and My partner and I were lucky enough to have had experience with the iStop Motion app on placement where we created a scene for their Viking topic with small groups of primary three children.
We decided to challenge ourselves with creating a scene in the plasticine stop motion style. We had an hour and a half to fully familiarise ourselves with the app and create our scene. We began by animating the process of creating one plasticine character, with little details such as the character picking up his second arm and ‘putting it on’ by himself. It was a very fun and engaging session and as we went we were further inspired, which 
culminated in a 14 second sequence where another character came along and jumped on the original and made a ‘splash.’
This was a fun activity with the potential to form a basis of a very engaging lesson. Besides the obvious development of Technology skills that takes place when creating an animation, asking children to do a task like this gives them an opportunity to “communicate clearly when engaging with others within and beyond my place of learning, using selected resources as required,” meeting the Literacy outcome LIT 1-10a (Scottish Government, 2004). A lesson creating animation is yet another opportunity to use Technology in the classroom in a way that promotes inclusion for those students with additional support needs, who may not be able to tell their story as well by putting pen to paper as they can by designing a model and ‘bringing it to life.’
The only limitation I could see with this in a lesson is that it took us the full hour and a half to create 14 seconds of footage. However, this could be useful in the classroom to promote groupwork – with small groups of children each creating one snippet of a story.
One key finding of the Digital Literacy Impact Review (Scottish Government, 2015) was that while there is evidence that digital tools and resources can help to close the attainment gap, it is just as important that teachers are equipped with the skills to use it; it is not enough simply that the technology is available for use in the classroom, teachers must be familiar with it and competent when using it. After this session, I am confident in my ability to use the iStop Motion app to create animations and quite excited to hopefully see it used, or use it myself, in the classroom again on my next placement.
References
Moving Image Education: [Online] https://movingimageeducation.org/create-films/animation [Accessed: 21 February 2018].
Scottish Executive (2004). Curriculum for Excellence. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive.
Scottish Government. 2015. Digital Literacy Impact Review. [Online] Edinburgh: APS. [Accessed: 21 February 2018].
