Not much progress with my film the lat weeks, but a lot of animation workshop with kids during the summer holidays. Today I'd like to share a clip with you which is animated by 7 to 11 years old school kids, who also made the fish puppets:

The animation is supposed to be a background for a children's musical, "The Rainbowfish", which is a popular children's book in Germany. A children choir is going to sing one or two songs from the musical during a charity event in October at the Stadttheater in Minden. Since there are a lot of other artists and singers, they needed a background which is easily (un)decorated. So I suggested to project an animated underwater sequence and tadaa! – I had another job.

The day we produced the animation, I had about 20 children around me, for over eight hours. I first did a small training animation, so they then hopefully knew what they were doing, and after that, everyone who wanted to animate was asked to make a fish or any other underwater creature. It was an awesome experience. Despite I were deaf and nearly dead by the end of the day, the kids were lovely and did a great job!

We shot the sequence under the camera, from above. All of the fishes and turtles and jellyfishes laid flat on the table. There's a lot of light flickering due to a sunny day but it works nice with the background I added in post production. I also added some music and credits but this is just for their DVD. At the charity event kids from three primary schools will provide the music.