The Science Class SMU Project

In my final piece I worked with Ceri. From the beginning I was unsure as to whether I should do a flip book, or a clay animation. Having looked on the web and on YouTube for some inspiration, I discovered that we could make a clay animation of a scenario in a science class where there is a teacher giving a Science lesson to two pupils. This would be both interesting and informative. Once we had settled on this idea, we both arranged to meet up to discuss exactly how we were going to make our animation. First of all we needed a classroom setting, some options here could have been to use Green Screening, but we decided to use an actual set instead as I felt it would add to the realism and feel of the piece. I wanted it to feel like a low-budget inidendent movie. Once we had made the set, we then made the plasticine figures which would become our main characters. Now that we had our set and 'actors' we needed a script and a basic storyline. Obvisously there was a 2 minute cap on what we could present, so we needed to find a way to create a classroom scene that presented facts, and close the 'story'. I felt that 2 minutes was not enough. Ceri and I both wrote the script together, making sure we presented enough factual information to go with the animation. We also decided to include the teacher and the children doing some experients in the 'classroom' as this would both look visually appealing, and also be informative for the KS1 target audience we were aiming for. Once we had roughly two minutes, we started to play with our figures and see if the script we had written was attainable within the setting we had created. Before begining filming, we decided to make intro credits at the beginning of the piece. At first we decided to write the words out on the white board that had been placen in the front of our fictional classroom, but the thought of actually capturing the words being written on the board came to me, and we decided to attempt to film it. Despite it being a long, labouring process, I think it worked out really well, and very much inspired by the 'lo-fi' credits in the film Juno, I decided to include the very same song as they use in the movie. As for the filming of the piece, the only challenges being presented were adapting each scene to fit in with the exact amound of speech that we had in the script. Also getting our little charachters to stand up and not fall down constantly was frustrating. We filmed the visual side of the project in one very long day and were very pleased with how it turned out. Next we spent all day recording the audio in Audacity andimporting every bit of speech into Zu3D. This took longer than anticipated, and it possibly would have been easier had we done it all in one go, however there was too much margin for error by doing it this way, and so we decided to do it little by little. After the speech we needed to have a few sound effects such as the door closing and a "crash" sound when one of the boys falls over after the tug of war. We recorded them using Audacity once again and added them to the piece. All that was left was to add the end credits, which we did in the same style as we had done with the intro. I am very pleased with how it turned out, it surpassed my initial expectations. I also very much enjoyed working in a group with Ceri.

Session 9

The trend of recent years has been for schools to use a range of media rather than simply relying in text based information (Lowe, 2003). I believe stop-motion animation can hugely influence creative technological learning because it "can help learners come to understand complex ideas more easily" (Ainsworth, 2008). There are many different schools of thought in this regard, some believe that animations have a motivating effect which can help people learn (Rieber, 1991), whilst others claim that "there are specific computational properties of animations that match the cognitive demands of a learning task" (Tversky et al, 2002). Contrary to those points, some view animation with more scepticism and recommend limiting their use. They tend to cite that learners have difficulty processing animation and applying it properly (Lowe, 2003). The success of stop motion animation in modern cinema also has an effect on children's learning as children would see these films, and if it gets replicated in the classroom then I think they would take notice and pay attention. It is a great, informal and fun way to pass on information and to educate. Sometimes in the classroom, the teacher speaking alone can be quite 'boring' for a learner and so a teacher should make the most of any opportunity to make the lesson more visualy attractive. It is becoming more apparent that there are different factors which influence the way people learn with animations. These can include: 


Cognitive Explanations
Motor Explanations 
Perceptual Explanations 

 At the moment, critics feel that more research needs to be done in order to analyse the positive influence of animation in education.

Various attempts at modelling

My attempt at a "happy" clay model: An "angry" model A "sad" model A "cheeky" model A "very sad" model

Session 8 - Model Making

During this session we made clay models. Initially I began the session by attempting to draw various different faces on a piece of paper but soon abandoned the idea when I remembered that I am not a particularly good drawer. Instead, I decided to concentrate of making clay models of faces and concentrating on getting the details right such as the eyes, nose, mouth and hair. Since my final project was going to be a clay animation, it made sense to me to do that. I anticipated it would be quite easy, but in fact it was a lot more challenging than I thought to get the little details right.

Session 7 - Storyboarding

In this session we created a storyboard. I designed mine with my final project in mind. I found it useful to consider how many different shots I will need in order to make my final animation, and it also got me thinking about the different types of shots I will use. After making a short storyboard I realised that just keeping to the same shot throughout the whole animation is a bit boring, and therefore I decided to use a variety of closeups and different angles; I believe doing this will make the final piece a lot more visually pleasing.

Session 6 - Green Screening

During this session, I worked with Amy, together we tried to create a green screen background. During this task we had mixed results as we both found it quite difficult to get flawless image on the screen. The first attempt went well, but we soon realised that there are so many variables which can influence the quality of the green screen, these can be things such as the lighting in the room, creases or folds in the felt, any slight movement... All in all, I think due to the difficulty experienced, I do not think either one of us would feel comfortable using Green Screening again to do our final project, however it was an interesting look at one of the options available to us.

Session 5 - Radio Show

During this session, I worked with Hannah to make a short, factual style of news programme. During the programme, we used a mix of humour and news items in order to create a very listenable and enjoyable radio piece. More importantly than the actual content, it was helpful to be able to use Audacity in order to make the programme. I myself have used Audacity before as I used to use it to record myself playing guitar (before I got some better software), so it was very helpful to remind myself of how to use it. During mine and Hannah's 'Radio Show', the news items we covered were gangland violence on the streets of Cardiff, the election of a new Pope, and the murder of Paralympic athlete Oscar Pristorious' girlfriend. The aspects of Audacity which I found useful were the use of different audio tracks and being able to use tools such as 'Noise Removal' and 'Changing the pitch'.