John Akre is an animator, videomaker and teacher who lives in Minneapolis, MN, USA. I often conduct exit interviews with the kids, and find that many of them have a new ability to talk about how animation works and have caught that enthusiasm for the magic of animation that I had as a youth.Īndersen, Yvonne, 1970, Teaching Film Animation to Children, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. Students are challenged by the patience required to make movies one frame at a time, but they also enjoy the reward of seeing their work come together so quickly and effectively on the screen. When we have finished animating, I ask the students to create sounds and voices as well as music that I record for the soundtrack of their film.

We make our animated films in sequence, from beginning to end. They also build skills working as a team, as some students move props while others direct and take the photographs. The large scale stop motion animation activity that I bring to the kids gets them moving around and staying active, which helps engage them in the slow process that is necessary to create an animated movie.

Students are able to see right away the similar frames of reference of the animation area on the floor and the screen space, and how the relative nature of up and down in those two spaces can be exploited to make the impossible easy.ĭemonstrating floor animation with a chair. When the frames are played back, the students see one of their classmates seem to rocket up into the air on a chair. Finally, I slide them into different spots and photograph them. I then invite one of the students to lie on the floor, in such a way that it looks like he is sitting on the chair. I set a chair on its side on the floor so that the base of the chair is on the bottom of the image area. When I go into a class for the first time, I set up the camera so that a large space on the floor is our animation stand. I keep my early animation experiences - and especially the lessons I learned through making mistakes and reflecting on them - in my head as I work with young people to create stories, build puppets and props, animate them, and record the soundtracks to make a short animated movie. It was like magic to make them come alive.

After making many mistakes, I figured out how to expose and animate the paper cut-outs that I drew and coloured. I began animating when I was nine years old after I was given a used 8mm movie camera. Animating on a table with kindergarteners.

Dragonframe stop motion software