Digital Discover

This week we hear from adviser Su Adams at U Can Too about an Easter project which saw young people achieving Discover through their creative digital work!

The Easter Break arrived and with it came the first of our two Tech Workshops.  We kicked off with an animation workshop using Zu3D Animation Studio.

From snakes to boxes, and plasticine to slinkies, we animated it all.

This workshop provided the opportunity for children to work towards Arts Award Discover, so the session began with a quick time-challenge to think of, and list as many art forms as possible!  The techies came up with some great ideas including sculpture, printing, dance, painting and many more.  After an introduction to the different types of animation, we then went on to find out a little more about Nick Park, creator of the popular animated characters, Wallace and Gromit.  We discovered that he was born in Preston, that he used his mum's video camera to create his first animation and that he went on to study animation at National Film and Television School in Buckinghamshire.  We also found out that he's created lots of other animations, including shorts like Creature Comforts and Feature Films like Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a feature length Wallace and Gromit film.  Most exciting, was the discovery that Nick Park is working on a new feature film, to be released in 2018 called Early Man!

Next it was time to consider our characters and storyline.  Some techies chose to animate preformed characters, such as Playmobile or Lego characters whilst others designed their own character which they made from plasticine.  Then we used a storyboard to plan our animations including what our characters would do and any text that they would say.  Some techies used their animation to tell jokes, whilst other had ideas around stories that they wanted to tell.

We collected images and added sound, text, titles and credits then rounded off the workshop with Cinema Time.  The lights were dimmed and techies proudly shared their animations with the rest of the group, and parents, as they arrived. 

The animations were hugely varied, all techies worked very hard to capture their collection of frames creating good length films, whilst taking into consideration the small movements needed to create an effective end result.  The concentration in the room was impressive and we saw some wonderfully clever ideas... the slinkie snake transporter was ingenious!

This blog originally appeared on the U Can Too website.