Making a story board is an excellent way of exploring and communicating ideas, especially where a group has to work together. Storyboards however are not sacred . Kids who are hard to motivate and who do have ideas in their heads might be better getting straight on with the action. Perhaps insist on it for their second movie... Or... better still, persuade the english teacher to do the story-
I always encourage original ideas, but it is asking a lot to get students to invent their own characters and their own story and learn to animate all at once. I don’t like to risk losing their enthusiasm by overloading them at the start.
Many of the famous animations (like films and novels) are really modifications of something that went before. Many kids have particular characters they can confidently draw or model and that can be a good starting point.
Children who lack the confidence
to perform live in front of their
peers can often enjoy speaking roles
in animations. . One Yr 10 boy with a
severe stammer was able to take the
recorder away in a room by himself and try his lines as many times as he wanted in his own time. It took some editing but this was his first speaking part in any performance ever.
DIGITAL STILLS If you are using a digital still camera for animation, set the image quality on LOW. Your camera probably boasts lots of Megapixels. Gives sharp photos, but you don’t really need that for animation and it uses up too much memory.
SOUND RECORDING
For sound recording and editing try AUDACITY.
You can download and use it for free from
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Do all your importing,exporting and editing in WAV format. You and your students can go searching the internet for sound effects to use.
Working on computer tends to be much more of an individual approach and does appeal particularly to certain students. Typically a student will produce an entire animation on their own and then work with a group of their classmates to record the dialogue. It is not uncommon for lots of work to be done at home and be brought back to school on disk.
Making stop-
More coming soon. Watch this page.
