The Clip Club

Session 10 – artist’s visit, screening & demo

This was our last session and we were lucky enough to have a visit from Rebecca Foster – a local artist and animator. We watched some of her work which included some chalk drawing animations – one was a music video and another one  – the Wallflower – featured on the TV programme Smart:

Rebecca explained some of the techniques she uses. She showed us one where she scratched designs on a roll of exposed acetate film to create this:

We then showed a few of our own animations edited in iMovie to few teachers, including our Head Teacher, they were impressed with what the children had learned and how they had been working together. The animations can be seen here.

After the screening we set up some editing and animation stations to demonstrate to the audience, including Rebecca, how we had been working over the past few weeks. This resulted in an updated version of an animation from last week:

Photos of the session:

… here’s what the demo produced in about 30 mins with Rebecca’s and other teachers’ help! Ms. Galeri, the Nursery teacher, would like the Year 6 demonstrators to go and show the nursery children the caterpillar movie.

Well done everyone, we’re all very proud of your achievements!

Mash-up animations created in Session 9

Here are some animated mash-ups – on the theme of Lucy dreaming – from lots of different digital sources over the past few weeks:

And here’s a short surreal game show, involving a microwave, created in the last moments of Session 9:

Session 9:inspiration, making & editing

We carried on from last week, opening up with some inspiring animations on Youtube – from PES (see Session 6 for links) and looking at our efforts from last week. We also watched a fairly average clay music video:

And one showing lots of techniques that everyone could now have ago at:

Here’s another tutorial I’m throwing in now, which might have been useful at the start when we had a look at flip books. It shows you an easy way of making your own flip book – showing the principles of animation – using a post it note pad :

Here’a an example mash-up of what we’ve creatd so far:

Session 8: Sledgehammer & Shine music videos

It’s funny but Mr. P and I both had the same idea to show everyone Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video from 1986… one of the first to use animation (stop motion and pixilation) in a music video. It won lots of awards at the time. Apparently, Peter Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while filming the video one frame at a time. Also, it turns out that Aardman Animation were involved in the parts that used plasticine and Nick Park did the bit with the dancing raw chickens! We also noticed how there was a mixture of live action and digital animation. Parts of the video reminded us of things we’ve seen over the past few weeks: the train going round his head was like the plane passing through the man’s head in the flip books we played with.

The other video below – Shine by The Dirty Heads – was suggestd by Mr P. as it includes quite a lot of stop motion clay animation and human forms/heads mouthing the lyrics to the song. All this is great inspiration for our final films, where we are trying to superimpose sounds, our photos, images and animated movies onto each other using a mixture of green screen and the cutaway functions in iMovie, as well as live action ‘sleeping’… to create the impression of a dream. See another animation towards the bottom of this page with balls of clay, that was made last week in Session 7 using I Can Animate, which will also be incorporated into the final pieces.

After watching these music videos and discussing the effects, 2 groups started playing around with all our documented digital stuff from the last few weeks – using the editing/recording/mixing/superimposing/audio functions in iMovie. Things are shaping up to produce a couple of animations that represent all the processes and activities we’ve experienced throughout Arts Award in Clip Club, in the form of mashed up moving image dream. The final movie below is one of the early edits from Session 8.

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