After 4 days of intense filming activity, Year 6 have gathered the footage they need for their animated films. Now all that is left to do is the post production. I say all... That is quite a task in itself!
The filming went very well. Thank goodness for the workshop day with Wendy and Roger. It meant that we were pretty confident with the software and had lots of good ideas for overcoming animation problems, such as how to make things fly or sink, and how to set up our backgrounds.
One of the problems we had to overcome was size. The models provided by Year 4 tended to be much larger than the Lego characters we practised with last week. That's because Year 4 designed such wonderfully detailed characters, and using pipe cleaners and plasticine, it was easier to make them about 12cm tall. But the scenery painted by Year 3 was A3 size, which worked fine with Lego models around 5 cm tall, but not always so well with bigger models. It's a question of perspective. But we found good solutions. Careful positioning of the camera, use of close ups, and enlarging the backdrops on the photocopier enabled us to keep the shots looking like the Year 5 storyboards.
It was a challenge filming the stories exactly as Year 5 wrote them. As animators, Year 6 had to be true to the authors' intentions, even if tempted to "improve" the plot by adding their own ideas. So whilst they could use their creativity to interpret the plot, they could not change it.
The films are made up of several scenes, assembled in order in Animate It. They have now been exported ready to import into iMovie, where we will add sound effects, voices, music and titles, and any special effects or transitions that are needed. All of this could be done within Animate It, but we think there are more options available in iMovie, and it's good to get familiar with another app.
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