We have been really busy working on our animations today. Miss Nicholson showed us the app ZU3D, this is how we are going to film our animations.

First of all we had to think of what we wanted to happen in our animation. Miss Nicholson told us it had to be about space and that we had to have at least 3 interesting facts about space within the animation, but the rest was up to us to decide. First of all we thought about an idea of what would happen in our animation. We had to then decide if we were going to make the animation 2D or 3D. Once we decided this we had to think about the characters we would have within the animation. We thought about what they would look like, how we would make them and the resources we would then need. Some of us decided we would bring in little lego figures as we were going to make our animation 3D. We then thought about the background/setting and what we wanted this to look like so we drew little sketches and thought about all the resources we would need. We then moved on to props, if we were going to have any, what would they be, how would we make them and the resources we needed.

Then we were ready to create a storyboard. Miss Nicholson gave us a sheet with lots of boxes on it. We used this to plan out our animation and what had to happen, what characters/setting/props would be needed for each stage. This will help when filming as we will have a clear picture of what will happen and what we need.

Then we looked at writing scripts for the animation as we had to speak in order to get the 3 facts into it.  Finally we looked at any sound effects or music that we might need/want.

Once we had finished all this we got to begin making our characters. background and props.

Miss Nicholson took us in groups to show us the app on her Ipad and the different features of ZU3D. We learned about the onion skin, this is the last frame you captured over the current image you are seeing. Its like a ghost picture so that you know where your last frame was and can see how much your character has moved. This prevents your animation from jumping all over the place. We then looked at how to add in music or sound effects as well as adding in titles, speech bubbles/text and credits. Its quite a good app but it will take a long while to film our animations as you have to move everything very slowly.

This is very exciting!