This Wednesday we had to work with children from the kindergarten.
They were around 5 years old.
When they came into he room they were shown a few animation movies we made.
After that they got a short introduction to the steps you have to make during the process of making an animation movie.
1. Idea
2. Synopsis
3. Storyboard
4. Background
5. Characters
6. Animating
7. Sound
After that they were split into groups of five.
The children had to take the puppet they brought and try to put them in a way so they expressed some feelings (happy, sad, …).
Then they also had to do it with their own face.
After that their puppets had to walk and greet each other.
When they got to know their puppet and were a little more comfortable they had to come up with a story with the characters.
They chose two bad guys, a good one, and two Princesses.
When they know the story completely each child had to draw a part of the story for the storyboard.
After that they had to place the drawings in the right order.
Then the staging began.
We made a background and placed the camera.
And finally we could take pictures.
Each child moved it’s own character.
At last an adult can edit the frames a little bit, if the timing isn’t right.
My thoughts about the day:
It really is difficult to communicate with children if you don’t know their language!
Also, we ourselves didn’t really know what to do, so I think next time would go a lot better.
The creating of the story took us really long.
Also drawing took long, but I don’t mind that.
Because of the drawing they drew themselves they are more connected to the movie and they learn a lot more.
Also because they had to place the drawings in the right order. So they really know what the story is about.
The moving itself was a little bit difficult in the beginning, the children moved their puppets a lot. But still, after a while they got it, I think.
I hope the children had something about this morning, although they did not finish their entire movie.
