Animation for Learning

www.cartoonster.com. I love love love this online resource. I found it on the Learning Place and it takes young students through the concept of Animation enhancing their visual literacy skills and further developing their multiliteracy skills. It is aimed at the younger students but as someone who loves the idea and challenge of turning a couple of still images into a moving sequence I learnt some new techniques. So much fun and potential in this resource.

The skills and techniques acquired using this resource could set the building blocks for a student to create a completely animated tv commercial for a Media Studies class or simply bring a diagram to life to explain a concept. It walks the students through step by step the basics and how to build on these principles to create animations that appear really complex.

I added the ball tutorial off the cartoonster site to a silly little animation of me and my fiance. It is a very simple animation but if you look at it using your visual vocabulary, I've used stop motion animation on the clouds, added depth to the clouds by making them move at different speeds and with different tones and used simple frame by frame animation to make the ball bounce through the scene. I used flash as my tool of choice. Imagine if the students were given the task of finding a theme and a message and asked to convey it through an animated 30 second movie. The possibilities for them to use their visual literacy skills are endless. Depth, space, colour, movement and sound can all be used to create a visually enriching story the communicates an idea or concept.