contributed by the Zach Attard, Samwel Attard, Ethan Grech, Matthias Muscat
The year 8 students were tasked to create an animation for the C3 subject they are studying during the ICT lesson.
This took around 6 lessons to create. To start, Mr. Edward explained what animation is all about, by showing a video of how stop motion animation was done for the Disney classic ‘A nightmare before Christmas’. Then we opened the program called Synfig studio and the students learnt how to use it, by a simple animation involving moving a red ball.
Subsequently, we designed our main character on paper and labelled all the parts of the character. Afterwards, we planned the animation with the aid of a story board of six slides which was very similar to a comic strip. Then, we got working on our computers by constructing the main character built out of simple shapes and a few colours, and made to be similar to the one in our design.
Finally, we brought the character to life by animating it. We also had to add extra elements, such as the background and a clipart. The students’ work was impressive and we really enjoyed these lessons. It is a good way to learn how to animate. We imagine that this could help in a possible future job such as game development, media, or the movie industry.