Picture This!

Aaron's school is on spring break this week so he's been going to a day camp. They must keep them pretty busy there because Aaron was pretty tired for today's workshop so we took it easy. First we played a game I created where Aaron had to identify the individual still frames of an animation and put them in chronological order as we watched the short film. The film I chose was La Dance des Brutes (Bully Dance) a playful tale that tells the story of a school yard bully but without using any words. The music and idiosyncratic gestures of the characters are very expressive, so the narrative is pretty universal.

For the activity, I printed 25 colour stills from the film onto thick board and cut them out. For the first round, the cards were already in order and Aaron placed the cards down as the images passed on screen. I added a bell sound effect over the soundtrack to indicate when an image with a corresponding card passed on the screen. For the second round we mixed up the cards and laid them out. Then on a large black Bristol board with boxes traced to fit each card, the cards were placed in order. The video file modified with sound effects and printable scans of the cards are available in the Workshop materials section.

After putting away the card game, we went on Aaron's computer to explore some of the excellent interactive animation activities on the NFB Kids website. These little online activities are really fun and intuitive to use. The Fun Stuff section has a variety of different games that allow the user to create a scenario, piece together a character, add sound and bring the story to life. CLAY ANIMATION is a good place to start. Create a monster by selecting from different heads, eyes, mouths, bodies, arms and feet. All the different elements can be coloured in, resized, flipped...

STORYBOARDING is the next game we played. Here you initially choose a character (a freaky-booking bird) , an action (wanders about) and a location (on a strange planet). Then the next step is to add the elements, music and dialogue to the first shot and set up the camera movements to the first shot, then click the second frame and continue the story. This is great excise in planning a film and in the end you get to play the storyboard you just created.

Finally PICTURE THIS allows you to do live action animation, by first creating your character, setting and sound and then making little changes frame by frame to bring the character to life. You can open and close the eyes and mouth, turn the head, twirl the arms and legs and move the character all over your chosen scene.

Aaron picked up on how to use these interfaces with almost no instruction. Have to give the NFB props for usability (and take back previous snipe at their mediocre music- the 'Back Porch' soundtrack is has a pretty rad riff!)