Today was more or less a repeat of yesterday as the class continued where they left off and also created more new scenes to animate.

The scene below as you can probably guess will be of a flower.

The next image shows a more complex animation being produced.

What do you think may be getting animated here?

By the end of the day quite a few animations were completed.

So far a lot of hard creative work and effort by everyone that is now showing through in the animations that have so far been produced.

 

Today in our groups we began designing and making our backrounds and objects ready to be animated.

After yesterdays tester animations it was easier to assemble the animations as we had a better understanding of how and what we could do.

Seen below is an animation being produced of a butterfly flying from one side of the screen and going off of the other.

Although a little out of shot, the camera is mounted on a rostrum, with a couple of lights mounted either side to help keep the same light across the animation.

Each shot is laid out on the base of the rostrum and altered slightly, then the software on the computer is used to take photos of each frame.Once finished all the images will be ran together to make the animation come to life.

Now things are getting more serious. This is the first of five full days this week where we begin to put out film together.

First though, we went through the bags of items that we collected on Friday at the Nature Reserve at Fingringhoe.

Once again in our groups, we set about putting together scenes for each season with the items we collected. A little later, items from around the school were brought to the classroom, and we had to make things for each season that we could then animate.

For example, the winter group used white K'nex pieces as snowflakes which they later animated.

Below, we see an animation being created. Here we have blue Stickle Bricks being used as sky and coins being used as the rain.

Outside the classroom, more stop motion animating was done using a video camera and most of the class who were lined up and animated just like the stop motion animations we had been shown so far.

By the end of the afteroon we'd done a few tester animations to help us grasp how it is actually done, and we were now ready to begin our film.

To be continued..........................

Today was field trip day, as we all headed on over to Fingringhoe Nature Reserve for a little exploration.

Unfortunately, the week that had thus far been nice and sunny, was for us this morning dull and wet. Yes, we got there, then it rained !

The only things dampened were us, not our spirits as our guide (Catherine) showed us around the Reserve.

The idea today was to collect items that we could use in our film. We split into the same 4 groups again as we did in the class the week before. Our 4 groups were again, as the seasons. Autumn, Spring, Summer, Winter.

We collected leaves, twigs, feathers, shells, grass, pinecones and lots more besides.

Apart from collecting things for the film we got to go in a hide and look for birds. However, on the hide door ws a rather large hornet as you can see below.

After a little more collecting, we headed back to the centre to dry out and we decided to have lunch before returning back to school.

As we were leaving the rain stopped and the sun came out........Typical!

 

Our second day then, and today was all about putting together our story. Kate and Lisa had put together on a board as you can see below, a list of things we could consider in helping us with a theme for our film.

Before we could talk about our story, we discussed another story that we all knew to help us understand how we could do ours.

We picked apart the story of "Red Riding Hood", by talking about the characters and setting. This gave us a better idea of what made a character good or bad.

Back to our film, the focus of which would be our planet, we looked at the four seasons. Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

Below is some of the words we associated with each season:

Spring: Growth, light, pastels, sun, cloudy, eggs, blossoming

Summer: Sunny, bright, spiders, sand, lizards, earth drying up

Autumn: Brown leaves, golden, plants dying, wind, leaves falling

Winter: Snowman, Jack Frost, snow storms, holly, footprints in snow, thunder

So, as a group we looked at all the things that would contribute to each of the seasons, and then get ideas from that on how we could work each season into our film.

We split up into 4 groups towards the end of the morning to cover each of the seasons. In each of our groups we had to try and come up with 10 or so things we could use in our film that related to the season attached to our respective groups.

To be continued.......................

Back for a 14 session Animation Project, Signals Media Art were back in school after having been here for a day last year showing pupils the basics of animation.

First off then, was some games to enable us all to get used to everybodys names.

The session was lead by Kate, with assistance from Rob and Lisa (Who was here last year)

After this just a few rules on how we all are to behave towards each other over for the duration of the project.

Kate's first question to the group was to ask for ideas on what's needed to make a film, and of course there were no shortage of suggestions.

Using some information that we were all given about animation, we were able to discuss various ways of animating, such as cartoons (hand drawn or CGI), claymation, such as the Wallace and Gromit films or Pingu.

The Claymation animation works by means of 'Stop motion animation'. This means a scene is set up, photgraphed, then the scene all slightly altered, and photographed again. This process is repeated until the end of the sequence.

After a small break, the children (working in pairs) had to make something from various small objects in the classroom that could be animated. Once finished everyone had to try and guess what each group had made.

Lastly, we all talked about the project that we'd be working on, in this case titled "Wonderful World". Again, as a group we got ideas from everyone on what "Wonderful world" meant to each of us.

Some of the ideas given are below:

Flowers & Butterflies, Books, Unicorn, Magic, Nature, Insects, Muisc, Ocean, Land, Freash air, Pollution, Animals.

And that is just about it for this first session.

To be continued.........................

 

Reception Class who have been doing "Doctor Who" stuff in class recently, including the fantastic monsters pictures that adorn one of the walls in the classroom were in for a treat today.

One of the Governors who clearly hasn't fully lost the 'Child within' part of himself just yet, materialised in class with a box full of "Daleks" and other assorted collectables (toys really!)

A small talk was given on how many Doctors there have actually been and here they are should you like to know.

1: William Hartnell, 2: Patrick Troughton, 3: Jon Pertwee, 4: Tom Baker (The longest at playing "The Doctor", 5: Peter Davison, 6: Colin Baker, 7: Sylvester McCoy, 8: Paul McGann, 9: Christopher Eccleston, 10: David Tennant.

The next Doctor will be played by Matt Smith, and did you know that there were two "Doctor Who" movies starring Peter Cushing

Also mentioned was why the "Tardis" (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space) is shaped like a 1960's Police Box

By this point most of toys had been handed round for the children to look at, who were fairly impressed already......

Then came the BIG Dalek who you could talk to and would then answer back.

After all that, small groups took it in turns to play with the toys in the hallway near reception, (maybe not so much to the delight of the office staff - sorry if your hearing was exterminated this afternoon)

Other pupils from another class used their 'Golden time' to pop out and have a look too. Over all, a good after noon was had by all.

On the 3rd October Year 5 were treated to a workshop by Signals Media Art.The aim of this workshop was 'Sound and Meaning' and 'Stop Motion Animation' in relation to films.

The above photo shows Lisa and Gary with a Video Camera and Sound recorder.

This was a taster workshop and if Signals Media Art get the funding they want, then they hope to work with Cherry Tree next year to make a small animated film.

This was a fun workshop as the children got to make all manner of different sounds by just using their hands and feet. They learnt how everyday objects could be used to make interesting sounds too.

James (above) was the video camera man, and he filmed the small animation the children did using leaves,conkers and sound effects made by the children.

Here we see Gary showing the children the animated film they made. The children had a great time, and all left comments about how much they liked the day. Below are just a few of them.

"I had a fun day"

"Come back every day. I had so much fun I almost exploded !"

"My best day"

"Come back please"