Animation clips can bring excitement to a multimedia project for children and

adults alike. The other great benefit of introducing pupils to animation is that

they truly love creating animations, as it has been as much a part of their

viewing world as film has.

So what is animation? The dictionary tells us that animation is to breathe

life into, to bring models, drawings or computer generated images to life.

We can do this in a number of ways but for the purposes of this section we

are going to look at two ways of making stop frame animations. A stopframe

animation is when images of a model made from clay, wire or a ready made

model put together at such a speed that to the human eye it looks as if it is

one continuous piece of action. We are going to use a Digital Video camera to

capture our images sequences using a program called iStopmotion

.As with any narrative you should encourage the pupils to plan their storyline

and think about scenes, shots, camera angles and framing as they would with

video. In fact many of the techniques used in filming also appear in

animation. The main difference with an animation is that we can make

impossible things happen and a useful exercise would be to get pupils to look

at simple animations such as Pingu or some of the Ardman animations so that

they understand the moving image language used in animation.

The next stage is to create some sort of scenery or back ground for the

animation. And decide on the type of models to be used: clay, plasticene,

Lego models or action figures.  To begin with using plain backgrounds for animations works well.

Now it is time to start making the models which should be as simple as

possible with one or two obvious large features that can easily be manipulated

on the models during the sequence. If you look at the types of characters in

professional animations you will notice that they usually have large eyes and

mouths.

An additional thing to check before capture is that the camera is plugged into

the mains and the DV tape is

removed. This will stop the camera from going to sleep during the capture. If

your camera has a Demo mode it would also be advisable turn this off. You

may also want to set the camera to manual focus.

When the camera is connected to the Mac with a FireWire lead and

iStopmotion is started up you will be presented with a dialogue box asking

you what size movie you want as an end product.

If all things are working you will see the set and model in the iStopmotion

window. To make life easier turn the onion skinning on as this will enable you

to see the previously captured frames as shadows in the window.

To capture a frame you should click on the obvious red record button below the viewer or by pressing the space bar. You can alter this default by going to the iStopmotion menu and preferences.

If you want to use the scene in iMovie the sequence should be exported to Dv format. Go to File and Export to DV.