Last weekend I taught my first animation workshop to adults aged 20 to 65 during a SCI work camp at the Thuringian Forest.

Our color palettes.

Warm-up: Getting the creative juices flowing

Compared to kids, grown-ups are much more afraid of play and their own creativity and need often more encouragement. I brought a lots of colors with me, literally my whole studio equipment. We had watercolors, wax crayons, acrylics, drawing ink, colored pencils and big sheets of paper. I also brought brushes in all sizes, bamboo sticks, painting knifes and drawing feathers.

My idea was to trigger the people's right-brain part where creativity and play are located. So I ask them to simply try all the materials before we start working on there animations. With their non-writing hand. With their fingers. And to give their natural body movements into the painting, because animation is all about movement.

We decorated the walls of the
yet to be refurbished house with our paintings.

Developing ideas

…was quiet easy for the participants then. I encouraged them to try easy things first, and to keep their story rather simply because we only had two days for the workshop.

While kids are good at play and experiments, my adult students had a better understanding of the technical aspects of animation, and a very individual way of finding stories. Only one of them had animated before, so it was all new to them.

They came up with some really lovely ideas, based on their individual experiences and knowledge. I'd like to share the videos of the workshop with you to get you an idea.

The Animations

All of them (except one) tried animation for the first time. Inspired by last weeks animation tutorial by Terry Gilliam we did cut-out animation since it's easy and often looks funny, too.

This first one is very special. Han Tse and Siao Chu are from Taiwan, and we talked a lot about Chinese language and calligraphy. Chinese signs are based on "real" pictures of objects or else. Han Tse and Siao Chu teamed up and produced this lovely animated piece in which the things in our world turn into their Chinese symbols:

Peter (like Pierre) is from the Netherlands, and they both were the oldest members of our group (around 65). Peter tells the story of a house that is searching for a good place to stay:

Peter.

Pierre paints since he had retired, and also has a very painterly approach towards animation. He tells the story of a woman who wants to hang clothes onto a washing line.

Pierre.

Katrin from Germany shows us what happens if pylons interfere with New York's rush hour:

Katrin.

Guiomar (from Spain) tells us a contemporary and rather brutal version of Red Riding Hood:

And Micha did this beautiful animation off a swimmer who jumps of a diving platform.

Micha's setup.

Finally: Ella (7) and Gabriel (8) were the youngest participants, guess who did what:

I'm always excited about what you can achieve within two days… They all did an amazing job!

If you want to join one of my animation classes…

you're more than welcome!

The next animation course for adults will take place in November 2011. From Friday, 11 November to Sunday, 13 November you have to chance to have an animating weekend (The course's timetable: Friday from 18:15 to 21:30, Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 15:30 o 18).

If you work with kids, that's great since I'm going to show how you could do animation easily with children as well.

I'll hold the course at the VHS Bielefeld, please check their website for details or just give them a call: +49 (0) 521 51 22 22.

– I'd love to see you there!

Love,
Jessica

"Do you know who or what is flying the space ships?"

From time to time I'd like to share films that were developed by some of my students in my animation workshops. This one is made by three ten to twelve years old kids who worked with me during this year's Easter holidays.

What I like so much about it is that it's pretty close to the early 20th century silent films. Back then all dialogue was shown in titles between the scenes.

For their film, the kids wanted to use balloons for the dialogue instead of titles, as they were normally used in comics. I pretty much liked the idea of using balloons, and so they produced this little piece in about 5 hours time.

They developed the film mostly on their own. They designed the background as well as the cut-out puppets and the balloons. The music and the sounds of the space ships* are part of the iMovie package that is delivered with the software.

I rather did the job of a midwife: I helped them at giving birth to their ideas. – Which is actually what I like best about teaching: showing others techniques and tools to solve a problem on their own.

* Yes, I know, you can't hear sounds in space, it's completely silent there. But with sound it's much more fun!

Here's the film:

It's not the action that I find most intriguing about this piece, but I enjoy the aesthetics pretty much. Today's insight: Teaching is always learning as well, and I suppose a good teacher never stops exploring…

…

In case you aren't familiar with the German language, here's a translation/transcipt of what the Aliens are talking about:

Meeting of the Aliens

Marie: Hallo, I am Marie of planet Yoga.

Albert: Hi, I am Albert from the planet Hugesmall and this is my sister, Alberta.

Bernhart: Hi, I'm Bernhart from the planet Eight Arms.

(Everybody says hi to each other.)

Alberta: Look, a rocket!

Marie: Rockets are passing my planet every day.

Bernhart: We rarely see spaceships around our place.

Marie: These rockets only pollute space!

Alberta: Do you know who or what is flying those space ships?

Albert: No idea. I don't care!

Marie: You better do! Anyway, we'd better fly home. It's late.

(Everybody leaves towards his or her home.)

Film still from "The Temple", a short film made by two boys in one of my workshops

Teaching art, and especially teaching animation is one of my most favorite activities. Usually I work on different projects with kids or adults at the same time. This time I'd like to show you a video which isn't animated in a narrow sense of the word. But I take animation literally: it means something like bringing someone or something to life, and this what we did.

The two boys (10 and 11 years old) brought shadows to life with their hands, like old fashioned or Indonesian shadow theatre. Invisible Shadows was the title of an exhibition at the Museum MARTa in Herford in 2010. I teach there regularly, and during this special course we mainly worked on shadowy subjects in all kind of artistic media.

The Temple

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If your not familiar with the German language, the story told is this:

Once upon a time there was a lonesome temple. The sound of a gong could be heard everyday. (Gong stroke) One day, an archaeologist wanted to know who may strike the gong. "I'm going to investigate who has hit the gong!" said the scientist, and that's why he went into the temple. After he has entered the building, he heard the gong again. (Gong stroke) Later he found the room where the gong was: he discovered a light shadow – He definitely wanted to reveal who that was. (Gong stroke) Closer and closer he came – and found an old anchoret. Thenceforth they became friends and met regularly. "Bye, see you next week!" – "Yes, see you then!“

When I work with kids, I give them a simple script writing worksheet so that they'd get an idea of how to write an animatable script. It's pretty simple, but amazingly helpful to guide them through the story. With these sheets you could develop a simply story outline within minutes (which is especially helpful when you only have a short period of time to work on a project).

(If you like, download either the German version of my Script (light) worksheet or the English one as a pdf file to use it for your own projects, and feel free to share it.)

All the props and puppets were cut out of thin black cardboard. The puppets have wooden sticks glued to their back so that they can be played without the hands being seen. The buildings also have triangular stands so that they stand upright. Everything is pretty simple and low-tec, but I like the aesthetics very much. We had a 250W spotlight lighting from behind and a screen of semi-translucent paper in front of our set ahead the camera. It took us about six hours to complete the film including set building, recording and editing.

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So. Wanna too?

There are more animating workshops at the Museum MARTa in Herford (DE): I'm going to teach an one-day animation workshop for adults on Saturday, 22 January 2011. It runs from 11 to 5 o'clock, and we're going to explore abstract and ornamental animation playfully.

This course is for people who always wanted to animate themselves but didn't really know how to start. There's no previous experience required. The fee is 20 €, and it would be great if you join us. Please call the lovely folks at the museum under +49 (0) 5221 99443015 for further information. Hope to see you there!

It doesn't matter how tired I am: I simply love to teach. For me, teaching means encouraging people to find their own voice in whatever artistic medium they choose. Interestingly, and to my great joy this works quite well with most of my students.

Yesterday I was wondering why I'm able to encourage my students, and how they always let me encourage them, but at the same time I'm not following my own teachings myself. My students trust me as a teacher, and they really want to learn something about making art. Even though I graduated in 2009, I'm still a student somehow: I'm still (and probably will always be) learning about art and animation.

I've been struggling with my stuckness for weeks, but yesterday I had an Eureka! moment in which I started to talk to myself like I'd talk to my students if they need help during my classes. I asked myself, if it's working for my students, why shouldn't it work for me as well? (And yes, I am talking to myself, constantly. You definitely should try that, but make sure that you're the only person listening...)

Talking To Teacher Me

"Need help?"

The internal dialogue was like this:

Me: Hey Teacher Me, can I ask you a question or two?

Teacher Me: Of course, what's the problem?

Me: I have this idea of how my piece should look like, and I really don't know how to turn this into reality, I'm afraid that I won't be able to design the puppets and the remaining sets as I have them in my head. And I'm totally afraid that my piece of art (aka the Orpheus film project) isn't going to be gorgeous and nobody would come and watch is.

TM: The first one is a technical problem, isn't it? Do you need more research about the materials you use?

Me: Yeah, I think so. I like the idea of puppets made of paper, but I do favor to animate a puppet made of cold foam. But I have no idea how I achieve that the cold foam looks like paper.

TM: What if you do a test run with a small amount of these materials first? Remember when we draw something, and you aren't sure how it's going to look like. You test it on a piece of scrap paper first, and if it works you'l place it into your main drawing.

Me: So you mean doing some kind of rough sketch with the materials?

TM: Exactly! And if it doesn't work you could ask the kind folks at stopmotionanimation.com for help as well.

Me: Sounds good to me! Working with foam puppets would be great, and I'm now having some more ideas of how to solve the cold foam looking like paper problem. I could cover the original model with a thin layer of paper before I cast the mold from it. If I use plasticine for the model, the final puppet cast will appear a bit like plasticine. Perhaps this is also going to work for a paper surface... Thank you!

TM: And what about your fear that it may not be good or interesting at all? Is it getting better?

Me: A little bit. But I still feel this certain pressure in my belly... Somehow I think I need more time to work on my film – not in the long run but right now.

TM: Yes, I totally understand you! You work as hard as you can at the moment, and there's a lot of other stuff in your life going on. You're absolutely allowed not to work on your film during the next week. After Christmas, you'll have two free weeks, and up to that time you simply move on with what you already do: decluttering your (work) spaces, cleaning up, and being good to yourself as in curing your sleep deprivation by resting and napping a lot. What do you think?

Me: That sounds lovely. Thank you!

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You'll get the idea.
Why I am telling you this wacky-me stuff? Because dialogues like the one above help me solving my problems. I often struggle, and sometimes it's so hard to move on with what I love to do, even though (or just because?) I love it so much. Hopefully this may help you as well if you suffer from the same issues, hopefully you'll learn from my experiences...

I wanted to do this for a very, very long time: Last year I presented my Myctophyformes Draco to you, a Chinese Lanternfish puppet I made for Shelley Noble's Halfland saga. And I promised a longer version of the making of back then.

Since I have documented the complete process of mold making and puppet casting, I thought it would be nice to write a small e-Book on how I do things. Perhaps the description of my workflow is helpful to at least one of you. Well, it took me about a year but here we go:

Click the image to download the pdf file (1,7 MB).

This small guide isn't perfect, and I'm sure you'll have a few more questions after reading it. But it's not my approach to offer you a perfect guide – this topic is way to complex to describe it properly within 30 pages.

Nevertheless I really hope it may get you started with

• making models for puppet animation
• mold making and
• casting stop-motion puppets from cold foam latex.
  

If you still have questions, please use the comment section or write me an – I'll do what I can to help!

The knowledge I share with you today is based on the knowledge of a number of amazing people I'd like to thank:

All my gratitude (again and again) to Mary Murphy, who taught me most of the things I know about cheap'n'easy puppet making, and I highly recommend her as a teacher! (You could also buy her books!)

Also a lot of thanks to my internet friend Shelley who's giving birth to one creative outburst after another, and who encouraged me to join her Halfland underwater party.

And last, thanks to all of you out there sharing their knowledge on the internet, and especially to the sma.com community! You all are great!

So. – Have fun!

Click the image to download the pdf file (1,7 MB).

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Supplemental:

There's a mistake occurring throughout the whole e-book: I talk a lot about cold foam latex, but it's only cold foam, without any latex involved. To be more precisely, it's an expanding polyurethane foam I use. However, that doesn't change the process in general.

(My brain somehow connected the words foam and latex strongly, probably because a lot of the pro puppet makers cast their models from foam latex that needs to cure in an oven. – Sorry for that!)

Thanks to Nick Hilligoss for the reminder!

Teaching animation is one of my favorite ways to earn a living in an art related field. I recently held several workshops in schools, museums or family eduction centers, and that's why I'd like to share a few more videos with you.

The videos below are the results of a workshop with primary school kids at the age of 6 to 10 years. Animation is quite difficult for younger children because it needs a minimum understanding of a very abstract concept. In my experience, stop motion and drawn animation work best with kids from the age of 9 or 10 years on. The younger students don't like to plan too much, and they don't really care about accurate storytelling, which is why it's sometimes simply difficult to understand their stories without any further information.

An Animating Workout

A fantastic way to do animation with younger kids is pixilation. I already wrote about pixilation in another blog post, so I keep this brief: pixilation is a technique where real people act like stop-motion puppets in front of a camera. Younger kids generally love to move, and they love physically demanding challenges. So pixilation is a great way to keep them moving and testing their limits, and doing animation at the same time.

Often the kids and I have to work with limited resources since most schools and public education centers have to save money – you've probably know that old story. And still I try to get the best out of it for kids. For the pixilation video we built a simple stage with blankets and gaffer tape (also, we had only 90 minutes that day). It doesn't look very professional, but that's not what this is about. It's more important that the kids have a really good time by learning something new, and sure they had:

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Altogether I had four 90 minutes classes with the kids, and after a short introduction with wooden shapes and plasticine, they animated small stories with plasticine characters in a town made from recyclable materials.

Here is one of those videos:

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I try to keep it simple for the kids, especially if I only have a small amount of time. I'd like them to learn that you don't need fancy stuff to create funny videos. As with all things the fancy stuff comes later as soon as we got some experience with materials and techniques. In the beginning, it's easier to solve fewer problems at the same time since animation really is a complex but yet playful field of work.

What do you think?

During the summer holidays I held an animation workshop at the Museum MARTa Herford which is a museum for contemporary art, design and architecture.

Lee Leyna, Leon, Johannes, Tom, Enrico, Jonathan, Lennart, Yannik, Max and Luca are between 9 to 12 years old, and the kids did a fantastic job. These are their videos which were made within one week:

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A Quick Change shows the fatal consequences of a volcano eruption.

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Slimozilla haunts a city and terrorizes its inhabitants.

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In Jump'n'Platsch a guy jumps from a skyscraper although he forgot his parachute.

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Change in Circles is a hand-drawn animation about, well, circles which are changing.

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A new twist on flying tells the story of a modern Johnny Look-in-the-Air.

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Do you know the joke about The Two Tomatoes? The fi rst one says, "Hello, Tomato!" and starts crossing the street. It gets hit by a car, and the other one says, "Hello, Ketchup!"

As usual, we used plasticine, paper, cardboard, watercolors, scissors and glue and last but not least our phantasy. I really love animation workshops with kids, they're so creative and not afraid of failing at all…

For the current school year I temporarily work as an art teacher at a Realschule (which is something similar to a junior high school), and since I haven't been trained to be a school teacher it's been fairly difficult to get into the flow. Teaching at schools is completely different to the teaching in museums or workshops, so it took all my energy do adapt to this new situation.

Most of the last weeks' time I've been sooo tired. When I eventually fell asleep in the evenings, I dreamed a lot of school dreams which are even more stressful than the reality. Today the holidays start, and finally I had a nice dream this morning I'd like to share with you:

It was an average school day: teaching, solving student's problems, talking to colleagues, whatever. For some reason there was a recruiting agency who wanted to hire animators at the school yard, and they asked me if I'd like to apply. To make a long story short, they hired me on the spot, I quit the school job and I lived happily ever after…

Nice one, eh?
Well, it fits.
All the time I've been thinking, "This is just wrong!" I love to teach but I am definitely not a school teacher. I am an artist, an animation artist, and I truly don't want to be something else. The school job takes all my creative energy, and there's nothing left when I'm back home in my studio. I got really angry about that. So now I try to remember what I really want to do. I talked to two curators last week to find new ways to show my works, and today I made myself an early christmas gift:

I purchased Dragon Stop Motion after testing it for ten days. Dragon Stop Motion is a capture software, a so called frame grabber. It's a great piece of software which works my digital SLR. It has an folder watch mode, and with my new wireless Eye-fi memory card I can use the preview function without a camera-supported video feed.

Buying the software was good and important, I now have the most important things of my technical setup together. I really hope that I'm able to work on the puppets and sets again soon. The dream was so good because it reminds me of what I really want. In my dream I signed the contract, and it was like doing it in reality. I woke up and thought, "well, then let's get started!"

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:

Deep Down in the Sea …Life's Raging

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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.

For the last school year I taught animation to student groups from two schools within a project called Kultur und Schule. The idea is, that students should meet artists there and try something new apart from all the useful things they learn in schools… The program runs some very interesting projects (which of course depends on the artist offering it), and mine.

No, seriously: I thought it might be difficult to keep them on it for a whole year. But they did a great job. The kids of one of my classes who did the video below are around the age of 16 now. It was their last year at school, and they spent much more time making the film than they should have…

They made everything by theirselves: the puppets, the sets and the lighting, the animation and most of the sound effects, too. At the end we ran out of time so we took a few iMovie sound effects to brush the piece up a bit. They tried to be very professional, and learned quite a lot (all of them animated for the first time). What I really like is the kind of humor they show… They're very influenced by media and have a huge repertoire of ideas and quotations. But see for yourself:

An Igor Gone Astray

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Here's a small translation for everyone who isn't familiar with the German language:

An Igor Gone Astray

Evil Mistress (from the off): Note to self: I definitely must dissect a clown. – Igooor?

A poster reads: Circus Buttercup at the Land Of Igors/Horror Valley on Remembrance Sundays at witching hour

(Crowd is cheering while entering the circus tent.)

Evil Mistress: Go! Get me the clown! …Go!

While Igor throws the smoke bomb, the audience asks surprised: What's going on?

After the Evil Hand has vanished, the Evil Mistress says: Igor!? …I must follow them!

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I think the rest is pretty self-explanatory, but if have any questions about the story, feel free to ask.

Things the kids learned:

• simple puppet and set making from materials like plasticine, paper, cardboard and watercolors
  
• setting up an amateur animation studio
  
• developing stories and planning animation
  
• that animation isn't the biggest part of producing an animated short
  
• it's all about planning
  

I learned:

• If kids like what they do, motivation isn't a problem.
• If you show them how important things can be which they don't like very much, they'll do it.
• It's great fun to work with teenagers, and it can be hilarious.

Thank you Pia, Janine, Maren, Maike and Ilhan for the great time!

Last week I gave an animation class for kids at a local education center. I teached a lively (and lovely!) group of seven boys from the age of 8 to 12 years. The course was ment to give them a general idea about the possibilities of hand-made animation techniques.

Some of the kids were absolute naturals and we had a lot of fun with all the techniques we tried... We started with moving toys, next plasticine and sand, but since there were a lot of boys who love to draw, we also did classical drawn animation, too. (We finished 12 animated clips that week... They were so motivated!)

I’d like to share some of my favourites of the drawn animation with you, since these are well done for kids of that age. The boys have quite a faible for any kind of violent stories, so if you don’t like explosions and dead stick figures, don’t watch the clips. I simply wasn’t able to encourage them to draw any pet stories... I’m sorry for that!

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This one is drawn by Timur, 10 or 11 years old.

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Enrico is 9 years old and drew an volcanic eruption.

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Hendrik was our baby being only 8 years old, but I think he did a terrific animation.

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Bernhard was the oldest, almost 13 years old, and almost didn’t stop drawing again...

Violence in Media Projects With Kids

Violence is a big issue in working with kids of that age. I remember that we played cops and robbers or Spiderman against God knows who or any other story about two groups fighting each other when I was a kid. But the kids today see much more violence in the TV, on their computers or on their mobiles than we did when we were younger....

This is not meant to be a forum for kitchen table wisdom but I really wonder how to deal with it. I always try to point out to the kids that violence just for their pure aesthetic amusement is an absolute no-go. But the kids usually don’t perceive it as a problem because violence so often is presented as a pure a aesthetic action and not as a pathogenic version of healthy aggression in movies or video games. The kids often don’t see any difference between those...

Do you have any ideas how to deal with this? Do you have any, and if, what are your experiences?

After finishing the Eurydice character design the work on my film project has been dragging the last days... But since I'm a person who barely sits still and loves to work, I'd like to share some pictures from my school workshops with you.

The kids are about 16 years old and we have about 2 hours per week together. They're quite ambitious and like to tell some kind of romantic and scary comedy story... I didn't post much about them since they has prepared puppets and props for months now.

But yesterday we put some of the things together and took some pictures to see how it may work. And heck: it works great! In the picture above you see Igor, the main character sitting on a desk and waiting for his first assignment.

The five of them do a terrific job and they collaborate impressively... They spend so much time and energy to create this lovely things and puppets, and they try to do it as professional as poosible...They love to play, too, and every week we have a great deal of laughter. If the animation is going to be as great as their models are, this would becoming a very nice film... But see for yourself:

The kids care a lot about details and try to give it a professional touch. They put so much effort in creating every single piece. It's simply nice to watch.

Igor, sitting in a piece of landscape.

These are all the finished puppets up to now placed in one of the settings. It's quite stunning how all the single pieces fit together... (Oh, and sorry for the blurred pictures!)

It's amazing to see what's possible in a such a little while. I'm already so proud of them. We still have some months left and I guess we're going to start animating in two to three weeks... To see how everything comes together in the end is very encouraging for me and my own project as well...

Keep It Simple

Since it's rather difficult to teach the fairly abstract principles of animation to kids at the age of ten to twelve, I now try to improve their understanding by just showing them different possible paces right before they start to move their puppets on their own. This seems to work pretty well.

This is Sammy's title design for strickwars animation. Guess what's his favourite movies?
Ten years old Sammy always wants to bring his plasticine stick figures come to life, they always fight with laser swords. I asked him to do a dry run to test his puppets first. For this I demonstrated him the very basics of animation like how to move his puppet slowly and how he'd archived a fast movement. The important thing here is that I didn't explain it again.

I found out that a spoken explaination often is too abstract for kids of that age. But if I'd show them how to animate with my hands, they absolutely understand. At least so it seems.

Due to the fact that we're working on five different little projects simultaneously, I went on to help the others with their puppets or props. When I turned back to Sammy a few minutes later, he looked very frustrated because he thought his animation wouldn't be good. But he hasn't watched it in real time yet, and I just encouraged him to move on and just finish the movement before doing so.

Stick-Figures Test Animation

He did. And he did so well, that I was absolutely stunned by his test animation! He was so concentrated all the time and put so much energy in this effort, and it all paid off:

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When we finally called the others to watch the clip, it was nice to see how surprised they were realizing what they could do with animation. Every time the kids and I watch even the tiniest amount of self-made animation they use to call for a celebration. And this time Sammy indeed earned the standing ovations.

or: Teaching Animation (2)

As you're reading my blog regularly, you'd know that I'm teaching two animation classes with kids in schools. A few weeks ago I introduced the students to pixilation, an absolutely outstanding animation technique.

Since their results are great and lovely, I'd like to share those great videos with you with their given permission:

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My personal favourites are the restaurant scene above and the murder below. – The kids were doing a great job!

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At that time, the kids and I were still working on the understanding of animation and it's principles. I wanted them to learn about the lengthy process of animation by literally experiencing it. Each clip (except the short dancing sequence) took about 20 to 30 minutes and they had great fun – although eypecially the younger were moaning all the time it needed to complete the pieces. But they love the results! And so do I.

I brought several items that day I had collected randomly at my home, like a fork and a spoon, a teapot, some cups, a rope, juggling balls, clothes and stuff like that. They were meant as an invitation to play and the kids did their best as you could see.

Most of the time they moved their limbs and objects theirselves but occassionally some of the others helped to correct movements or other details like hair and else. We're going to add sound effects to the videos later, so it might be much more fun to watch them again then.

Pixilation

Pixilation is a variant of animation in which real people act frame by frame like stop-motion puppets in front of the camera. The word pixilation might spring from the expression pixilated which again refers to the Pixies, an old English fairy folk – due to the weird, shaky or crazy movements this technique creates. At least so they say.

Norman McLaren is an artist who had made regular use of this technique. He seems to be the one who coined the phrase, and his film Neighbours (1952) is a great example of how it could work and works. Perhaps only Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer music video (1986) is a bit more popular object lesson on pixilation. You'll find both Neighbours and Sledgehammer on youtube.

And I nearly forget to mention one of the greatest pixilation movies ever here, The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) by Bolexbrothers in which they combined pixilation with stop-motion animation. Due to the sheer endless list of great pixilation films and videos it's easy to miss one. There are a lot of contemporary filmmakers working in this field of animation right now.

Oh, and during my research on pixilation I found several information about the Sledgehammer clip. Did you know that Aardman was involved, and so were the Brothers Quay? Rumours say that a young Nick Park animated the chicken dance... I'm not sure about the Quay Brothers here, I always thought it had been Jan Švankmajer who added his unique style. However, I wasn't able to find clear information about that. Do you know anything more specific? Feel free to add a comment!

How to teach something which is almost unteachable? Animation is mostly based – as a lot of other things, too - on experiencing it and its priciples. I could read and being told about it. But it would best if I just try to expand my sense for movement and timing by simply practising animation itself and by reflecting what I did. Now I that I teach animation in two school projects, I instantly realize which explanation works and which doesn't.

I have two groups of students. The younger are about ten to twelve years old and the older kids are around the age of sixteen. At first, they developed a lot of paper stripes for my zoetrope the other weeks. Those worked great and the kids learned a lot by drawing them. My assumption seemed to be valid that children who work manually and encouraged will create amazing things... A lot of art teachers don't seem to know this... On the one hand I was surprised by how much they liked it, and on the other hand it just confirmed my guess.

After that time travel to the 19th century they wanted to move back to present time and to animate with plasticine. This hadn't gone well at first because especially the younger ones didn't understand that they had to move the puppets in little, sometimes even tiny steps related to what they want to achieve.

So I tried not to explain again but to design an exercise which helps them to understand the idea behind animation. I did this piece of work with both groups. So see the videos below:

25 Steps To Go With A Little Piece Of Plasticine

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The video above shows the exercise done by the younger children, the video below shows what my older students did.

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Each of them was given a piece of white plasticine of the size of a walnut. And they got 25 steps each to change the plasticine's shape, too. The kids normally animate on twos so it would make 2 seconds of animation per student. I wanted them to find out what they are and are not able to do within two seconds and few options.

Almost everybody was surprised by their results. Some of them found it very hard to extend the reshaping to the 25 different pictures and some of them thought it's way too little time to show what they'd planned. Especially one very impatient boy at the age of ten or eleven did a great job: when we started animating he eventually became so very calm and concentrated. It was lovely to watch. I found it most surprising that both groups animated similar shapes.

The summer holidays had ended several weeks ago and I still owe you some results from my workshops So, here it is:

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The text is completely in German. There are only a few spoken sentences mostly referring to the observed action.

I had two courses, and the video above was made by the younger kids. Their age ranged from 9 to 11. Altogether, the kids worked about 15 hours on that film. And yet I'm still stunned what they had archieved.

We started moving a simple wooden puppet so they could get a feeling on how generally animation works and how to use the computer and the software.

Two things happenend: first they were surprised how much work animation actually is and second, how much fun it is to watch the puppets coming to life.

I kept the setup simple trying not to concern them with too much technical stuff: We had an DV cam which we eventually used to record audio effects after filming. There were also two Ikea desk lamps and my tiny iBook with all the required software. And we had several cables we stuck to the floor with gaffer tape to avoid stumbling and after this, completely resetting our studio.

I tried to encourage the kids to tell a story together because I want to motivate them to bundle their energy. If anyone needed a pause, the others took over. Younger children often don't have too much stamina. This worked pretty good but we then had to face another problem...

The girls wanted to tell a pet story and the nine year old buy wanted to do an AC/DC concert. But we managed to put these opposites together as you can see above. The boy really was a fan and I hope AC/DC won't see a problem here. I just couldn't persuade him to use some other (rights free) music.

The kids had a great time and so had I. I love working with children because they tend to be totally free in their creative decisions. They just do things without struggling so much.

And despite the simple equipment their ideas were wonderful and realisable. They often found solutions on their own. And I learned from them again as well. My most favourite insight of that week is that we need to play to develope solutions. I am too often too worried about seriousity.

What are your experiences with kids and arts? Did you ever do (animation or art) workshops with kids? What did they teach you? I'd love to read your experiences.