Good Samaritan Animation: Summer Holiday Club

In August 2013 I had my first experience of working with a team of young people aged 8-13 to make an animation. I decided not to make any props in advance but to rely totally on plasticine models and cut out drawings that the children made themselves during three one hour sessions.  

There wasn't enough time to draw a storyboard, so with the help of Rev Fiona,  we told the story and made a stop/start replacement animation of the three scenes, broadly: accident, rescue and recovery. I had high hopes that the children would see the scene they had created on the day, using free-to-download video editing software: VideoPad.  I was lucky to have the help of Annie, a primary school teacher with the presence of mind to add a scream and many other essential features.

Here's the animation   

   

What I learnt

• You can't do it all in one hour.  Even with three adults and only two children, the whole hour was spent creating and filming the still shots.  I compiled the video later at home which gave time to remove the shots with hands and poor lighting.
• Try not to move the camera.  The pan at the start is okay but for focusing and continuity, it's better to fix the camera in one position.
• Chance ideas add a great feel of spontaneity, like adding foil at the last moment.
• Relax.  You can't enter the required open creative mood if you're feeling as anxious as I was in the first session.
• Changes of scale are useful. We made two models of Bob, one 4 times larger, you don't notice the switch.
• The clear plastic sheets used behind the characters reflected the light but made it easy for characters to slide.  Cutting them to size would have helped.
• Annie's contributions, which included the voiceover script were invaluable and made the film special and enabled the children to play a variety of roles: making the characters and scenery, moving the characters, operating the camera and recording the sound.
• The trickiest part was matching the film clips with the narration.  We didn't know how long each scene would be, which is why in the film, the injured Bob is lying still for several seconds.