Week 10: Interviewing the Staff

Although there were only 5 of us this week, we assembled our kit and set about capturing short interviews with some of the school staff.
Using a DV camcorder, a microphone, a boom and a tripod with a dolly, we trundled around school and interviewed 4 members of the staff for our "Teacher Comforts" project.

The plan is to use these interviews to animate our clay models to.

We also shot the scene, without the Teacher in, so that we can use it as our animation background.

Week 9: Quick Claymation

After looking at the details of the NGFL Get Creative competition that we intend to enter, we viewed some past winners and then reviewed our website and blog (taking time to look as some of the club's work while we were at it). There was added interest because we shared the room with Steel Band who were very interested in what we were doing.

Next we launched in with some stopframe animation, our aim was to make three short animations during the rest of the session. While the members prepared new clay models I (AD) set up the webcams and the software so that capture could start as soon as possible.

We had great success with our instant animations, splitting into three groups ad making one model each, the stories evolved organically and perhaps a little chaotically - good fun!

The clips can be viewed here:

1. Rabbit's Troubles
2. Totally odd friends.
3. Everyone hugs the Hugfish

We also looked at my modelling efforts, although my model, Mildred (pictured above), had an accident which resulted in some damage to her head. Later, her hand fell off. Nevermind, she's only made of plasticine.

Week 8: Planning our sets

Last week we missed a week because of the trip to MOSI and we returned with a reminder that we had sets to build for our "Teacher Comforts" project. Mrs Harper led a discussion about the scenes we would create and explained how we might design our sets on paper, annotating the props and how we might make them.

Before we settled down to our planning I showed a short video (as we have become used to doing this) and this weeks clip was an animated science piece about the Sun which had been made by They Might Be Giants. It was very interesting as a science lesson as well as having some good animation ideas within it.
The clip can be viewed on YouTube>>

During the session we also caught up with the collection of images for our Blue Screen news broadcast experiment. Aliens clips coming soon.

Week 7 - Video Graphics and more modelling

This week we reviewed the footage from our blue screen news shoot and discussed how we might need titles on our footage to identify who we are, where we are and what broadcasting company we are presenting for.
The group then set about collecting a background image (from google) for our piece to camera before starting to create the information for our screen title.

After this we returned to our clay models to discuss with Mrs Harper how we might improve them and how we might set about creating a set for them to be placed in once we start capturing frames.

Next week, there is a school trip to Manchester to visit MOSI - so no MovieMakers Club (shame).