At the beginning of our second week, we went straight on to creating our own movie animations using plasticine. Mandy and I worked as a pair and I feel we worked very well together. We decided to stick by our theme of a healthy lifestyle and began creating plasticine models of fruit. The plan was to have the character in our animation cutting up fruit for herself to eat when she returned from the gym. However, we came across a few problems as we progressed... We spent just over an hour creating our plasticine models and when we set them out we realised that our plasticine was almost the same size as our character and it was not in proportion. We very quickly made our fruit slightly smaller and set up our animation scene (with a kitchen scene in the background and white paper for the floor), ready start using the Digital Blue cameras. We also had to close all the blinds as we had a lot of light reflection from outside. We started taking snapshots and moving our plasticine models as appropriate. Mandy and I both found this very frustrating: it is very time consuming and takes great patience.
During the process, we came across another problem. The white paper we used for the flooring in our animation moved slightly when we moved one of our models. If we were to do this again, we would either have to secure the paper with blue tack or just use the desk as the floor and made sure we were not using a computer right next to the window.
We eventually, finished our 'filming' and Collette helped us to export and save the AVI file. We did not however have time to add in any extras such as sound as we ran out of time. I have a copy of the animation saved on the University computer system and Mandy has a copy on a USB drive to be uploaded.
Overall, I enjoyed creating our short animation despite it being frustrating and the Digital Blue Movie Creator cameras were fairly simple to use.
Here is our movie animation:
On Thursday, our session with Sharon, we discussed our Voices of the World project and were allocated countries for our bear journey. My group is linked with a German TEI: Birgit Reutlingen. We then created a task for our Voices of the World project before saying goodbye to our bears!
We discussed some of the different useful websites that could be used to create a task for the different countries. These included Mixbook, One True Media, Voice Thread, My Plick and Slideshare. These may be useful in the future in different lessons.
My group was asked to create a task linked to the month of February and so decided to go with a Valentine's theme. We used the following poem and created four vokis, each one saying one line of the poem:
"Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you."
As an extra, we created another voki saying "I love you" and created a power-point showing some traditional which we then uploaded to the Slideshare website.
I had some difficulty getting the vokis we created to display on my blog - to see the task Mandy and I created for the month of February, please click here.
You have given a detailed account of what you did in week 2. Try to reflect on how you might use the different tools with children in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI am glad to hear you enjoyed the Animation process and did not become too frustrated.
ReplyDeleteTo help you with writing a post read below:
What I would like you now to do when you are writing a blog post that looks back a a process is to use the following methods:
1. Describe - this is where you tell the readers what you did. A simple description of the task. Why were you doing this task? What was the learning outcome? Where did it fit into CfE?
2. Reflect - this is where you look at what you did and tell us what happened or did not happen. What were the problems? What were the successes?
3. Evaluate - this is where you will reflect on the process from your own personal development and how you could use with children.
In the above you should provide links to websites and have at least ONE reading reference to support your reflections.
I have written a post on my blog related to the above process that might help.
Lastly, you may wish to look at some readings related to digital media and animation. I have provide quite a lot of links in the module material that will help.