Laura Bellmont - Animation Lab for Kids: Fun Projects for Visual Storytelling and Making Art Move--From cartooning and flip books to claymation and stop-motion movie making

FUN PROJECTS FOR VISUAL STORYTELLING
AND MAKING ART MOVE

LAURA BELLMONT + EMILY BRINK

2016 Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

Text 2016 Laura Bellmont and Emily Brink

First published in the United States of America in 2016 by

Quarry Books, an imprint of

Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

100 Cummings Center

Suite 406-L

Beverly, Massachusetts 01915-6101

Telephone: (978) 282-9590

Fax: (978) 283-2742

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the copyright owners. All images in this book have been reproduced with the knowledge and prior consent of the artists concerned, and no responsibility is accepted by producer, publisher, or printer for any infringement of copyright or otherwise, arising from the contents of this publication. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and ensure that credits accurately comply with information supplied. We apologize for any inaccuracies that may have occurred and will resolve inaccurate or missing information in a subsequent reprinting of the book.

Digital edition published in 2016

Digital edition: 978-1-63159-186-0

Softcover edition: 978-1-63159-118-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

Design: Debbie Berne

Photography: JUO photography LLC

Shutterstock see .

To all of our TGS students:
You make our work good. So good.

1. UNIT 1
   BECOMING AN ANIMATOR
2. UNIT 2
   OLD SCHOOL: TRADITIONAL ANIMATION TECHNIQUES
3. UNIT 3
   DOWNSHOOT ANIMATION
4. UNIT 4
   STRAIGHT-AHEAD ANIMATION
5. UNIT 5
   PIXILATION

One of the best things about meeting new people is telling them what we do for a living. How fun it is to see the excitement, curiosity, and sometimes confusion on their faces when we explain that we teach people art-making through the magic of stop-motion animation. When people ask, as they often do, what stop-motion animation is exactly, its fun to see their faces light up as we mention Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or The Nightmare Before Christmas to help give context for what we have the pleasure of creating with our students, both young and old, on a daily basis here at The Good School.

The questions that follow are some of our favorites. Can children really make stop-motion animations? Can they really make all of the sets and puppets? Can you teach me how to teach my kids? The answer is yes, yes, yes! We wrote this book to help you, the teacher, the parent, guide your child in creating a beautiful and unique work of art that will last a lifetime.

These days, our children are more than tech savvy. They know their way around smartphones, tablets, apps, and social media. While it is impressive to see such young people engage with the world in this way, we do not want them to lose the ability or desire to make something with their hands using raw materials. When combining the nonlinear, handmade element of creating puppets and sets out of materials like clay, paint, and paper with the more structured, sometimes tech-dependent, process of stop-motion animation, the result is both creative and educational. Whimsical and focused: the perfect combination when working with young people today.

We hope this book guides you through the ins and outs of creating a stop-motion animated film. We hope this book gives you the practical tools to help your kids make the films they want to make. We hope this book gives you the freedom to try new things and to push this medium in new ways. And we hope the process brings you and your children so much joy and pride.

Happy animating!

One of the most wonderful things about the art of stop-motion animation is that absolutely anyone can become an animator. By learning the basics and starting with a few simple techniques, every child, every group, can create a unique take on the process. You might even invent something the world hasn't seen yet! For such an old and beloved art form, its wildly exciting that with stop-motion animation, theres always room for something new.

This chapter reviews the basics to ensure that your stop-motion projects will look as professional as possible, no matter what the subject and which art medium or technology you use to create them.

Lets talk for a moment about animation.

Animation is a movie-making technique that uses a series of... anything, really: computer graphics, photographs, drawings, paintings, handmade puppets, or even three-dimensional printed models. Each unit in the series is slightly different from the last so when they are viewed quickly in sequence, there is the appearance of movement. Imagine how flip books work, with each image on the page quickly scrolling to the next.

Another way of describing this process is when you quickly take photos of something in motion. When you scroll back through your cameras photos quickly, there is the illusion of motion.

Stop-motion animation uses the same idea, but the action happens in real life, not constructed in a computer. The elements that are given life through stop-motion animation are often created by hand (or even by computer using three-dimensional printing). Stop-motion animators manipulate their subjects using their hands.

The stop-motion animation filmmaking process is relatively simple. First, you take a still image of a subject. Next, you move the subject a little bit with your hands, completely clear your body/hands out of the area that the camera can see, and capture a new image of your subject in that new position. By continuing to move the subject and capture each new move, in the end you will have a series of images of the subject doing an action in sequence. By playing back through these pictures very quickly, the object appears to be in motion.

There are two main ways that you can string your images together in animated sequence:

You can import your still photos from your camera into a photo-editing program like iMovie. In that program, you can adjust the length of time that each picture is shown and add sound, music, and text before saving your finished film.

You can connect your camera to a stop-motion animation program during the filming process. These programs automatically string your photos together as an animation and save them as a moving film. Often these software programs come with very helpful features, such as the onion skin tool that layers the last photo you took over the one you are about to take so that you can precisely plan your next move.