Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Grades K-4: Stop-Motion Animation

With second term in full swing, almost all of the (kindergarten - grade four) students at Beverly Glen have finished storyboarding for their animation projects.

Storyboarding involves drawing a series of cartoon-like sketches to show what a finished film will look like. My storyboard (pictured at left) shows Orange Guy coming out of his hole, and walking off screen.

Once students complete their storyboards, they need to create sets for their characters to walk around in. My set consists of a background (pictured), a grassy floor, and a couple of trees in the foreground for Orange Guy to hide behind as he leaves his hole.

Once the clay we've ordered gets to the school, students will be able to make their characters, and use some of our brand-new Samsung S760 cameras (thank you parent council!) to take the pictures that were drawn on their storyboards. We'll be using Photoshop Elements to make WMA animations and Glikr to create GIFs.

Since I'm sure you're curious, here's the WMA test version of my animation. It's a rough copy, but it's still pretty cool.