Stop Motion Animation for the Nation!

For all you Wallace and Gromit fans, make stop motion come alive!

Buy some clay or make your own play dough using this recipe here 

Breakdown;

1. Storyboard your story - stick figures will do.

2. Do scene by scene drawings, you will need a beginning, middle and end. Download storyboard templates from here.

3. Use a webcam connected to a computer - trust me its easier.

4. Download relevant frame capture software Frame by Frame is a free one.

4a. If you haven't got a webcam, you can use a digital camera just use a tripod & keep the camera STILL!

5. Keep  models bold and simple. Make facial features large so you can move them around a bit

6. Important! - The models must be able to stand up on their own.

7. Take one shot per movement, continue until end!

You should have your web pics in a nice order for you to play and edit. You can duplicate frames or delete the unwanted ones and voila! you have an animation!

Options;

-Choose a plain background or a drawings - it looks better

-Paint the inside of small cardboard boxes to create sets.

-Add your own sound effects & dialogue

-Create a different mouth for each vowel sound = "AEIOU"& swap the mouths between each shot.

-Make sure your in a bright space or move a desk lamp closer to light your set.

If you are using Windows movie maker and a digital camera this tutorial should help.

Making it all 3D!

Just replace your 2D webcam with a 3D camera (on a tripod). They are pretty cheap now (this one's around £30 from Amazon). While the process of taking 3D images is a pretty straight forward one, making the movie is not so easy!

The above camera takes 3D pics using the side-by-side method.

Easy Way: Upload you movie to youtube as 3D video. Done. View with 3D glasses.

Hard Way: Use a decent video editing package to overlay and colourise the images. Done. Eventually. View with 3D glasses.

Fantastic Creatures - October Half Term Challenge

MinaLep

The October Half term challenge created monsters!

During October halft-term 20 students from across the city used digital tools to create fantastical amalgamations of their favourite animals. Spurred on by ideas presented in nonsense poetry - i.e., portmanteau words (Snake + Shark = Snark!) students transformed the real into the mythical.

With the support of the Open University and SHEBEEN, students also had a go at being nature detectives with the OPAL project. They used digital cameras to record the insects they found then uploaded their pictures to the iSpot website for identification! 

Hosted by the PIE/ArtsLab initiative, a partnership between Sheffield Hallam University's Equality and Community Engagement manager Maxine Greaves and Destinations Arts, this project was about using fun and creative ways to promote literacy, Maths and Science learning using digital technologies.

RinoWolf

PIE Vs SheffieldArtsLab

A Digital Arts and learning collaboration/interaction between Destinations Arts and Sheffield Hallam University.

A project that experiments with interactive creative learning tools.

More information coming soon!

MIT App Inventor

Originally a Google Project, MIT App Inventor allows to you to create on Android based handheld devices. MIT, the makers of Scratch are now managing the project and offering loads of support to would be App developers.

The App Inventor offers a natural progression from the Scratch programming environment as it offers a similar colour coded 'drap-and-drop' coding solution. 

It all online with no downloadable moving parts and if your used to Scratch and programming concepts, its very easy to pickup!

I recently created an App that translated English to Igbo, which was nice...

Beginners Interactive Games Workshop

1. I recently completed a series of "Introduction to Programming workshops with FE college tutors. We used Scratch, the fun code writing environment for creating interactive programs! 

2. Participants followed a set of simple exercises, building on their knowledge as they went along.  By the end of the first session, participants were able to create a sophisticated interactive game.

3. During the following weeks, we looked at more advanced interactive designs and how to introduce Scratch and programming concepts into the classroom. 

 The first Session Outline:

1. What is Scratch?

2. Understanding the Interface

3. Exercises

4. Short Game Exercise

5. Programming Concepts

Workshops are applicable to Primary and secondary settings too! For more information about delivering workshops check out the makedigital website or the teaching resources at the Scratch edu website

Scratch and Raspberry Pi's

Great example of using ultra low cost computers to inspire young people to code. 

A London primary school got kids from 5 to 11 to learn about coding with Scratch, a fun free programming resource. No reason why this can't be repeated all over the country. Scratch is free to download on an Apple Mac, PC or Linux based computer OS.  

The Raspberry Pi is a £25 computer the size of a credit card. Its so cheap and powerful that it could revolutionise computing in schools!

There is also a downloadable step-by-step resource for teachers to use in class. Check out the article in Wired.

Archie Markham Project Launch

A media Arts and performance project celebrating the writing and life of E.A. Markham!

Fours creative's -  an Actor, a Writer, a digital Artist and a Dance Artist will work with pupils from Huckolow schoool to produce a spectacualr performance for Black HIstory Month 2012!

Themed 'many voice' our first session involved pretending to be someone else. With our help, students worked out  a scenario where they pretended to be old by dressing up, speaking in an old way and moving in a  old way - it was fantastic!

Afterwards students evaluated their experience and told us how they wanted to project to do in the future.

Archie Markham was professor emeritus at Sheffield Hallam Unvieristy, he died in 2008.