Rockmount Workshops

Day One

The first day of the three day workshop was really interesting, and we learnt quickly that there is a difference between teaching someone our age how to do something, and teaching the same thing to a year 6 student. We found that we had to spend more time explaining the technique, and then repeat ourselves a few times before it sunk in. Also, Toby taught us that it was important to keep the children focused at all times, by basically talking to them constantly. 

We also learnt that it was important to ask the children at the end of the workshop what they had learnt, and ask them what the techniques were called. The year six teacher that was sitting in the room with us explained that they might not remember what they had learnt unless we got them to tell us. 

I was surprised at the quality of some of the students work, espescially the mono prints, because a lot of the work was good. We also got a lot of ideas from the children for our animation that we then used later on in the week once we got back to Brit.

Overall, I think that the first day was a success, and we learnt a lot that we could then apply to the next two days (:

Working with you

One day left before the final show!

So how did we get here?

We started the work almost one month ago thinking about the most basic principles of animation and film. 

Mmh... what is special about animation? Why animation?

I use animation in my work because it is a bit like magic...

Making animation is, in a way, the inverse process of making a movie, when you have an actual movement in 'the real world' and the camera records it as a series of still images. When doing animation, you record these still images one by one and then put them together. When you play them back, they're both the same: 24 images per second, one after the other, playing so fast that our brain creates the illusion of them being one continuous image in movement. Now, this is magic!

So, in our introduction to animation (and to my work), we had to talk about Méliès, a French stage magician, friend with the Lumière Brothers (inventors of the cinematograph), who saw the immense potential of their recently invented 'motion picture projector' to implement his shows. And so he started cutting and pasting film (literally, with scissors and tape), 'montaging' and hand colouring picture by picture to create the most impressive magic tricks ever seen. 

And, talking about beginnings, we also talked about the Lumières. Or, more precisely, about the audience of their first screenings (the first ever cinema screenings), when people ran away from the screen where a train was arriving to the station and gentlemen lift their hats to salute the projected images of ladies walking on the street. Now, how amazing it would be if we could recreate that powerful physical response in an audience these days, when we're all so used to screens and we know no train could ever escape from one of them... (or could it?).

In a bit of a time jump we went to talk about Jean Luc Goddard's films, about what the audience expects from a film, what a film expects from us and about how to play with these cinematic conventions.

Because we had to make our animations for a live performance context, to be played on a stage, we also looked at the use of projections in performance by Forkbeard Fantasy.

So, after this introduction came a lot of hard work from all the students. First challenge, I think, was the team organization, more than the film making itself... Sharing tasks, organizing roles and communicating with each other is not always an easy job, but necessary for film making and I think the achievement of these abilities has been the biggest success of the project. And I hope you find this as useful (or more) than all those technical skills you've learnt with amazing facility and the exceptional creativity and artistic talent proved by you all. 

Guys, well done! Amazingly done!

I can't wait till tomorrow!

Now onto Making the Animation!!

High Wire Act Animation.

Now that we’d completed the Rockmount workshops and we’d got all of our other visuals, we were now had to put it all together.

We decided to take the frames by having it on the floor with lighting either side as it would be easy to move everything around easier this way and have more control on our changes. The camera was on a tripod directly above the set strapped to a ladder – we used tonnes of duct tape for this. Don’t want to go breaking any of the school’s equipment now!

Set for High Wire Animation.

We had a system in creating other animation sufficiently by having 2 of us in the studio taking the stills whilst 2 of us in the Mac suite putting the previous stills together using Final Cut Pro. I would say we stuck to our strengths but we found it was best to occasionally swop roles for a bit to get a fresh look on things.

The whole process was pretty straight forward, just very time consuming considering the number of frames we were making. We constantly had to make sure the camera was aligned properly (this allows us to avoid cropping the frames when editing) when we put it back on the tripod after running the memory card back up to the Mac suite.

I was new to using Final Cut Pro so it was daunting at first but Clara Garcia Fraile (our artist in residence) was there to help and she gave us a booklet that explained each step. Using this programme we were able to increase the scale, level the angles, change the sequence, adjust the brightness and the timing of the original frames. IMPORTANT RULE: SAVE WORK REGULARY!!!

Using Final Cut Pro.

Once all the editing was complete and we were packed up in the studio all that was left to do was burn it onto a disc. Typically, this was the most frustrating thing of all – it took so long due to its size.

Clara actually said this was the software many TV/Movie makers would use, so who knows: This week Bloomsbury, next week Hollywood!!

First week on the project

In the first week we had to get a lot of planning dun for the week ahead, where we would be teaching year 6 children at Rock Mount primary school.
To start with we had to research into community art, we looked at animation artists like Blu, director Jeff Chiba Stearns- (yellow sticky notes), Scott Coello- (she farted and created the world).
We also had a visiting animation artists named Clara, she showed us her work , which was rely interesting it was (interactive animation ) which got people to respond to hew work be doing something physical.
She also did a work shop with us , where we made our own trial stop frame animation’s .
She was also to come in later on in the projects to teach us how to use final cut pro to make our animation’s in .
We had to do a lot planning for the 3 days, making

trials, and lesson plans for designs of the horses and textures and what we were going to do in our workshops each day.



I had the a tedious task of drawing and photo copying 25 different horses for the work shops

At the end of the week we had to make sure we had all our materials together which was a lot!

The Week After School: Making the Animation

After an eventful week of teaching primary school children at Bloomsbury, this week we got to work with the actual making of the animations. After taking time to decide what pictures we would consider using and which we wouldn't, we organised each frame into different sections (e.g, frame 1 of the gallop, frame 3 of the trot etc etc). I was then left with the long and gruelling task of scanning everything in, while Zak and Rebecca were to colour in all of the frames of the horse that didn't manage to get coloured (a whopping 2 frames).

After everything was scanned and organised (which was a day's work), we went to the Mac Room (this was the next day). Clara, an experienced animator and tutor for this project, was our guide in teaching us how to use Final Cut Pro, a movie editing program which we were using to create our animations in. To create our animation, we have to import a whole selection of images into the library, and select the ones we need and for how many frames they will appear on screen. Final Cut runs in 24 frames per second, so for example, making an image change every 2 frames (often called "animating in twos") would make it 12 frames per second. We chose to animate in 3s, so 8 frames per second.



We were told that a required element of the animation is to have a black background. Rather than go over every frame of the horse animation in photoshop and making the background black, we were told of a quick fix by Clara; to simply invert all the pictures with a filter built into Final Cut Pro. While first skeptical about how this would look, as it would invert all of the colours on the horse and not just the black and whites, it ended up giving our horse a much more magical feel, making some parts like the feather appear to be glowing due to the inverting of the shadows.



After we had added all the frames of the animation, making the horse stand, walk, canter, gallop, and then slow down to a halt, we cleaned up a lot of frames (getting rid of the mess for the really messy frames that were made by monoprints). Once this was done, the only thing left was to add the sound effects to the horse. We went over to production to collect a variety of sound effects for the horse, and edited them in, trying to loop it best we can. After we did this, everything was done with the animation, and the only thing remaining is to have it burned to disc.



However, that wasn't the end as it turned out. Production thought the sound quality could be better, so they decided to handle it themselves. We were then handed music that we imported and added to the animation. Later, we were shown the horse animation projected, and were shown some problems with it, such as the slight change in scale and some of the unseeable colours from some of the monoprinted horses. We were then instructed to make all the horse frames the same size as a certain frame that they picked out, and to colour all of the unseeable frames. After hours of rotating, scaling, and colouring images in photoshop, we were officially done.

Zak, hard at work.

Teaching week

I feel that the first day went well, Jack, Rebecca and I started off with the presentation after introducing ourselves. After this we explained to the kids what we were doing with the things that we produced which was problematic because most of the groups didn't explain enough maybe we did not explain enough or they did not understand fully because I can’t remember if our group asked if they understood, but I think that at least some of the students understood because when we explained again they seemed to know what we were talking about. After an exhausting first day, I had lost my voice from being the person in our group which tells the students to listen.

The next day, we were doing paper maché. The group, being a fiery group, got really involved and enthusiastic but also got really messy. I did say in the demo to take off the excess glue over the glue pots but they seemed to forget this. This meant that all the people in our group were cleaning up accidently spilt glue, refilling glue pots and salvaging peoples work from being water logged with glue and no one was directing the class because we all had our hands full. Towards the end of the lesson, the group pulled together more with help from Toby and we got them to finish and go to break on time but there was a lot of tidying up to do that the students did not do properly or didn’t do because of the lack of time. Toby (our tutor) had to give us constructive criticism and extra help because this lesson was a bit to noisy and chaotic. She also gave us Issy to work with increasing our group from 3 members to 4 which is the amount that the other groups had. After their break we did textile sheets, Rebecca was in charge of giving demos and Issy seemed to gain control of the class and made them quieter but this could also be because we were not doing a messy exiting lesson, it was much more pleasant then the first half of the lesson.

On the final day of teaching we had to disappoint our group because we said that we would be using the computers and we were known as the ICT group but unfortunately they did not have Photoshop. Instead the kids made a design of what they wanted to paint the paper mache horses like, and then Jack gave a demo on mixing paint to get different colours because lots of them did not know how to do this. Then finally they painted their horses.

The kids were sad to see us go, i was happy with the work the students produced. Also for some reason all the students really liked cleaning up.

"If u can give a child only one gift, let it be ENTHUSIASM!!"

I think i can speak on behalf of all of my group when i say, entering Rockmount primary school - we were equally petrified. In a neat, nervous line behind Diane, we followed obediently to our classroom of residence for the next three days. As we clutched on to our art and craft materials we stepped into the hall; lining the walls were stacks of tiny chairs, reminding us that the workshops were for children - nothing scary about that right?
As we began re-arranging the tables, mats, chairs and art materials; the room started looking like our own space - making us feel slightly more at home. A faint rumble sounded from outside the hall as the anticipation rose: the children started were arriving. The door creaked open as the four of us stood in a line at the front of the room, ready to welcome our new students. A sweet smiling face peaked round the door, "Can we come in?" Delight spread across our faces as i nodded and welcomed them in.
Our first activity (papier mache balloons), went down a treat with the children - giving them the permanent title of "The Messy group". In our group discussion on the mat area, the children threw iniviative and unique ideas associated with the circus - little did we know that when we started the discussion, we would soon be accompanied by a steal pan band in the room next door.