Design Ideas for Animation

Planning for Kilve Open Day

Since I met Alison Griffin at Kilve Court on a couple of study weekends we were running we've put together an exciting course combining the mathematics of tessellations with animation. We're both really excited, and books are now open for the course which will run on 24-26 October 2014.

As a warm up, we're running a series of workshops for Kilve Court's Open day on 26th July. The overall theme is landscape, so I've been putting together some animations to use as examples for the day, to give children some ideas. Here's some of the animations I've created.

Here's my flower - drawn from about 12 notelets. I got the idea while I was waiting in a beautiful garden for my younger daughter's piano lesson:

Here's my snail made from a pile of notelets:

This is more the sort of thing we'll be doing at Kilve on the open day. I get the children to take photographs, and then use Monkeyjam to bind them into one film. Thanks to my daughter, Sarah, for her help with this. This is the second version we made. The first one we filmed upside down, and it was really shaky, plus the contrast as too much, so there were big dark patches. This one came out much better:

Finally a simple idea I had with scrunched up tissue, a la 1970's primary school. It's come out alright, and was very easy to make, though it too ages to scrunch up all the paper!:

I spend a lot of my time getting ideas for animation for the children who come to my clubs. I carry loads of stuff around with me too, so I thought I'd put some ideas here, so that you can see them whenever you want.

Clay Stopmotion

I carry a lot of play-dough with me all the time. Its easy to make (here's a brilliant recipe from imaginationtree.com ) and cheap, though I'm experimenting with getting good colours at the moment. Here are some thins I've found while surfing...

http://afortnightofmustard.blogspot.co.uk/2011_10_01_archive.html


http://www.orange-elephant.ru/master_classes/ball_clay/bear

Here's a great list http://pinterest.com/trifffany/clay-for-kids/ including

http://pinterest.com/pin/151222499959473420/



http://pinterest.com/pin/151222499958449334/

Here's a slightly different idea, but simple

https://pinterest.com/pin/480688960197906545/


https://pinterest.com/pin/480688960197906455/


http://wallpaperscraft.com/download/toys_cartoon_clay_kids_49255/1920x1080


http://www.ronitbaras.com/focus-on-the-family/parenting-family/how-to-raise-gifted-children-let-there-be-light/#.UbRbMee9FoA

Other fantastic ideas at http://theimaginationtree.com/2013/01/the-z-of-play-dough-recipes-and.html



http://www.amaco.com/amaco-lesson-plans/lesson-8-clay-animation/


http://www.ehow.com/list_6068630_different-types-modeling-clay.html

Backgrounds

Other Materials

http://pinterest.com/pin/33847434669694993/

Drawn

I recently bought a book from this website http://www.thaneeya.com/ and http://www.art-is-fun.com/how-to-make-a-pattern.html about colouring mandalas, and used her ideas to plan a lesson.

Her pictures are copyright, but I wanted to give you a flavour of her designs



This page, though, shows step by step how to build up a simple, yet beautiful design, and I hope that one of the children will pick up this idea and use it to animate their own short.

Other resources

How To
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-claymation-stopmotion-video/
http://www.amaco.com/amaco-lesson-plans/lesson-8-clay-animation/