  Animations using clay or plasticene are easy to do, and can be completed by students in several classes. Clay animations require that students use their imaginations, create a storyboard, plan carefully, and use equipment properly, to achieve a satisfactory result. Here are the tools, materials and equipment you will need:
Creating the Frames: After deciding what the animation would look like, our first step was to take ten photographs of the piece of clay. After each picture was taken, we flattened the clay slightly. We planned our animation as a clay blob that flattens itself and then returns to its original shape. (O.K., not terribly exciting, but it was quick to do!) 
 
 For purposes of this illustration, and to keep the file sizes small, we resized the images, making them quite tiny. Students making their own animations may also want to do this, so that their final creation can be taken home on a floppy disk. With access to a CD burner, you can of course make the images larger. We also did not use special lighting, or a tripod. You will see that this made the final animation a little 'choppy', but we still managed to obtain a decent result. Now you have to load the images into your computer program for making animations. GIF Animations: If you plan to make a computer gif animation, you will need a program that does this. We use Gif Construction Set Professional, and are very happy with it ... it is simple to use, makes nice small animations, and wasn't expensive. You can order it and download it on-line (it's a Canadian company) from www.mindworkshop.com Gif images use just 256 colours or less, so these types of animations may produce unusual colour changes; they don't work well with photos, but are ideally suited to drawn animations. Clay animations work fine, if you ignore the backdrop and shadow colour changes. Here's the finished product, a gif file that is 65k in size. We used all ten images, in order, and then the same ten in reverse order. We also added a title frame. The animation could have been made much smoother by using a tripod, and by shooting more pictures and squishing the clay less between exposures.  The advantages of using gif animation? The process is simple, and the final file sizes are small. It is also easy to set the timing between frames, and to fix problems in the timing. Jr. High students master the program after just several uses.There are some disadvantages. Only being able to display 256 colours may be a problem, depending on what is being animated. Also, there is no way to add sound or music to a gif file. MPEG Movies: Mpeg (or mpg) movies allow you to add sound or music to your animation, and to retain all the colours in the original frames. The disadvantages of this format are that the program needed to create and edit videos will be more expensive, and more difficult to learn. We've successfully used MGI VideoWave III (available in computer stores for about $100) with Jr. High students, who need about three to four 35-minute classes to complete and edit a video. Also, the typical mpeg movie is much larger. The example included below (the same animation that was 65k as a gif file) is a much larger 680k mpeg file. However, as long as students keep their animation short (20 frames or less) and small, they can take them home on floppies. A CD burner solves that problem, of course; some of our students have made 5 minute videos that exceeded 20 megabytes in size. Available below is the same animation, where we used the same 10 frames (slightly larger this time) and a sound effect, to make an mpeg movie. We didn't make any special effort to coordinate the sound with the pictures, and it still turned out O.K. The addition of sound, and the lack of colour distortion, make a much nicer animation. Also, students can use the skills they've learned to produce and edit live-action videos. Because the file is so large we can't make it available for viewing right here. However, we zipped it to make it smaller for a reasonably fast download; once you've saved it and unzipped it, you can watch it immediately. A Science Fair Project: Colby and Evan in grade 5 decided to try clay animation to make a video, and to display their results at our Science Fair. They chose the mpeg movie method so that they could add a music sound track to their creation.   Their storyboard involved an imaginative tale of knights and dragons, many scenes, and a lot of little characters made from plasticene. They discovered while filming the first scene that keeping their characters intact between photographs, and avoiding damage while changing their characters' posture and position, was quite challenging. Nevertheless, they were able to finish one complete scene, and produce a test movie, which turned out quite well. They then created title and credit screens, and added suitably eerie music. |