Animation -Take 2!

"Almost anything is, in principle, possible through collaboration because you are not limited by your own resources and expertise" (Huxham and Vangen, 2005, page 3)

The focus of this week's inputs is collaboration - a vital tool to enable teaching professionals to better their practice by learning from, and with, others. Our collaborative skills were tested on Monday whilst filming our animations. There was a lot of confusion surrounding the task as various people had different ideas about exactly what we were supposed to be doing. In the end, we worked in groups to make an animation, similar to those made in first year (see my previous post to witness the joy of my masterpiece!) Keira, Caroline and I were joined by Gillian to work on an animation, based on our topic 'People Who Help Us'. We had a clear idea of exactly what we wanted our movie to consist of, but struggled when it came to putting it into practise.

We filmed our animation using the Digital Blue Animation cameras, although very user friendly and easy to work, the process for filming can be quite frustrating, especially as the finished clips ake a very short film. To make your animation 'flow', the camera must be clicked around five times and the models moved very slightly, in order for each scene to be continuous. We found this to be a problem as our unsteady hands made this intricate process very slow (especially when it came to a certain life guard and her rather large bust, which made her very hard to keep balanced!). Communication is also key whilst collaborating on a shared project such as this. We realised the importance of this whilst filming our scenes as poor communication between the person moving the model and the person taking the shots, resulted in hands sneaking into some of the scenes! We recognised this as a problem and overcame it by devising a solution where the camera said 'NOW' before taking each click, so that the person moving the models knew to keep their hands out of the shot. This resulted in the rest of our clips being filmed with a lot more success! Due to a shortage of time, we were only able to produce two short scenes with our models, rather than a scene for each as we had planned.

Here is our animation in all its glory! (An Oscar for '127 Hours' or 'The King's Speech'? Clearly the judges haven't seen this little gem...)



I think this activity would be really engaging if used in the classroom, however, I think a class would need very careful demonstrations and the task to be broken up into much smaller steps, throughout a longer period of time. I would be keen to use this as a round up activity at the end of a topic, in order to assess the children's knowledge gained over the course of the topic. I would make the process of planning, creating and filming the animation into a mini topic, ideal to keep the class motivated and engaged in the lead up to a school holiday, perhaps! These would then be a fantastic addition to a whole school assembly, in order for the children to show off their final work and feel a sense of achievement!

I will continue with the rest of the week's activities in tomorrow's blog.

Nicole
xxx

Huxham, C. and Vangen, S. (2005) Managing to Collaborate: The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage. London: Taylor and Francis Routledge.