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.

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.

This week I'm going to start my in-school workshops. I want the kids mainly to work with their hands.

To get them started I thought it would be nice to learn about the technique behind animation. I don't want to teach them but I'd like to show them how it works. Philosopher John Locke once said,

Nothing is in the understanding, which was not first perceived by some of the senses.

(though I always thought this was an quote of Aristotle, but anyway).

Photograph ©Andrew Dunn, 5 November 2004.

For this purpose (and because I wanted to do it for a long time) I built a Zoetrope. I'd like to do a kind of How to build a Zoetrope here. So:

How To Build a Zoetrope

If you'd like to do it the same way I built mine, you'll need the following materials:

• an defective record player (seen at ebay.de from 1€ plus shipping)
  

• chipboard in the desired size of your stand (mine was less than 0,04 m2 and costed me exactly 0,35 €)

• wood glue, spray mount

• acrylics

• black cardboard in required size (depends on you record player)

• long paper stripes (again, size is derivated from the size of you final cylinder)

Helpful tools:

• screw drivers and whatever you need to disassemble the record player carefully

• a drill and appropriate boring heads

• a brush, a cutter, a ruler

• pencil, eraser

• a calculator (unless you're brilliant in mental arithmetics) to calculate the size of your cylinder

• thick felttips

Please always keep health and safety in mind! Work slowly and concentrated.

I wanted to keep it simple, that's why I took a short cut: I got an old broken record player from my future parents-in-law and completey disassembled it. I just needed the turntable and its mount to make the table again turn smoothly. By the way, there are plenty of mechanical pieces left which I'll keep for future props... You'll never know.

The next step was to construct a stand where I could lay the hinge in. For this I bought chipboard. Bigger DIY stores may cut it to your preferred size and it's very cheap. I decided to make a box of 12 x 12x 11 cm.

First I drilled a hole into the top side with a range of 4,5 cm in diameter (it depends on the size of the parts of your player). This is because the lower part of the hinge needs to move freely. Then I started glueing the chipboard pieces together. Wood glue does a great job here.

I painted the box with black acrylics to hide it a bit and then screwed the bearing on the top of the box.

Then came the trickiest part: Calculating the size of my cylinder and where to place the slots. I cut 12 of them which will be enough. Later, you'll have to draw the same number of pictures on a paper stripe. The space below the slits should be same height as the gaps theirselves.
As you can see in the picture, I cut out tabs on the bottom at the cylinder to fix it to the record player later.

Then, finally, I glued it together with spray-on glue and fixed it to the plate.

Very last step is to draw a stripe at the same length of the inner circumference of your drum. I took mine and divided it into 12 frames of the same size. My "story" is a jumping fish. It's very helpful to draw a tiny storyboard here, and the last frame has to be followed by the first one again. Every cycled animation of 12 frames could do a great job here.

Keep the drawings simple and use a thick pen. You won't see delicate lines.

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This is my strip as an animated gif:

I want the kids to experience how we perceive moving pictures generally, and to do their first steps in animation without a camera. So they're going to draw single frames on paper stripes. I'll let you know how it works.

Had anyone build a zoetrope before? What are your experiences? If anybody did by the help of this, I'd love to see how it works for you.

My new DV camcorder is broken. The Panasonic NV-GS90EG-S doesn’t play the tapes anymore though it still works with iStopMotion. I used it last week for my animation workshops with the kids and the course was a really good experience. The camera worked well and the kids could simply use it, but I’m going to send it back to Panasonic and I’m excited how long it’ll take until I’ll get it back.

It’s annoying because we recorded the sounds on tape and I can’t get them on my computer now because the mechanism suddenly doesn’t seem to work any longer. One of the boys brought some African instruments which worked fantastically for fooley effects. The rest does iMovie and its sound libraries. This really is a simple set-up but it works great with the kids because they could focus on their clips.

I’ve got an old but pimped iBook G4 (late 2004). It now has a 160GB hard drive and 1,25GB RAM which is enough to run the Leopard system propperly. – And to have fun while editing movie clips. Here’s the first clip made by the kids with the wooden puppet I made earlier:

The kids had a natural feeling for timing. They realized very quickly which clip may work and why. And they also realized what they could do with the puppet. It was great fun to watch them discovering puppet and software and clay the first day. We can learn so much from them...