BLOG 7- Animation 20/02/18
This week we began to explore Animation through the Puppet Pals and iStop Motion applications on the iPad. To gain some understanding of ‘Animation’ we were guided to the Moving Image Education website (MIE) where 5 main categories of animation were categorised:
- Cut-out – generally considered the quickest and easiest
- Stop-motion – example is plasticine models
- Pixilation – humans become the puppets
- Drawn – example is the classical Disney animation
- Computer – also known as CGI and found in games and movies.
(Moving Image Education website)
With this information it was plain to me how I could bring animation to a classroom learning environment as the breadth of the possibilities was large. From something as simple as an ICT class to something as complex as Drama, Arts and Crafts or Literacy animation will appeal to the children.
For our tasks, firstly we looked at Puppet Pals and explored the basic steps of animation with premade backgrounds and characters. This was fairly simple with just small extra tweaks such as audio input. Once we were comfortable enough with the basics we moved onto our main task which was to create a short animation of our own choosing. We were allowed to pick what type we wanted to work with from the 5 mentioned above. My animation was a mix of cut-out and stop-motion animation and I used both paper and toy figurines for my video. The main plot is that of 3 alien humanoid creatures travelling through space and arriving at a new planet: Earth. I understand from some of my classmates that they found the accrual recording part of animation quite tiresome and time consuming but for me it didn’t seem too long at all.
As Jarvis (2005) has suggested that “Animation involves the stringing together a sequence of static images, generally so that they appear to move,” I had to capture consecutive still images repeatedly and when put together an animation was created. I very much enjoyed this session and totally understand the appeal to children. This could be used for Literacy, photography, all throughout the curriculum and also for real life scenarios as well to deepen their understanding of maybe cartoons etc. Lastly this can also be applied for students who may struggle with written work as ‘e-inclusion aims to use digital tech to minimise the problems that pupils with learning difficulties experience’ (Beauchamp, 2012, p.55).
References:
Beauchamp, G. (2012) ICT in the Primary Classroom: From Pedagogy to Practice. Pearson.
Jarvis, M. (2015) Brilliant Ideas for Using ICT in the Classroom: A Very practical Guide for Teachers and Lecturers. Routledge.
Moving Image Education website: [Online] Available at: https://movingimageeducation.org/create-films/animation [Accessed: 20th February 2018]
