Saturday, 18 April 2015

City Arts centre workshops

Recently I took on the opportunity to take animation workshops at the city arts centre. I was pretty excited because this time I would be almost completely in charge of the workshops.
I was told that I would either be teaching adults or children who didn't have much experience with animation. I went about making a workshop plan.
My workshop plan:
      •This project will take a group and have them collaborate to make one film that will consist of many different animation mediums, during each class we will work on the main film but also have smaller activities to allow the participants to produce more personal work.
•The final piece will be around 2 to 3 minutes and consist of an animated section made by each person.
•Ideally a new animation method will be introduced each week, towards the final weeks we will use the methods learned to put together the film and decide what methods we would like to use again to complete the film.
•The film also will not contain dialogue as this is a very hard factor to pull off in such a short time and most of the time it is unnecessary.


Week 1
•Week 1 will consist of an introduction of story boarding.
•I will begin by introducing myself and showing my showreel of work, to give them an idea of what I do. I feel that my style of animating will probably define a lot of the workshop so I feel it will be important to show them what my work looks like.
•I will then explain how the film will be created and show examples of mixed media films,
•I will also show examples of films with no dialogue to explain how it is unnecessary, and to also give them an idea of how we can tell a story without it
•Then we will move onto story boarding, we will do an exercise that helps to start telling a story and then convert that into a story board. I will bring examples of story boards to show and will also show animatics.

•We will begin story boarding on an individual basis and then we will put our stories together to try and make one big narrative

Week 2 


•For this week I  will teach the rub out method. This is where you take a drawing and rub it out and draw a new one, each time ou photograph it and the result is an animated film.
•This can be done with one camera as each person will draw then photograph and then go back to drawing so it can be done on rotation
•I will show examples of rub out method and give a demonstration

•We use the story board as a reference and then begin animating based on that

Week 3


•Cut out animation
•This week we will focus on cut out animation, I will show some examples and then we will begin on puppet making

•Working in groups we will make a set and characters together and then make and animated scene, those who aren’t animating will make film stills from their cut outs. 
Week 4
•This week will follow 3D stop-motion methods
•Following what we learned from week 3, I will show examples of puppet animation and then show how to make an armature for animating
•I will bring a pre made armature and one group will animate it while the other will make their own puppet and vice versa.
•We will also look at pixilation animation methods

Week 5
•During this week we will focus on hand drawn animation,
•Each person will be given thin paper to draw on that allows them to see through it
•For this class it will be possible for each person to do their own animation as I will take home all drawings and photograph them

Week 6

•We will review all the animation methods we have used and see how the scenes work together, from there we will add or refilm certain scenes and finalise the film. 

Bragela was happy with my proposal and went about trying to find me a group to teach. After a while she found a youth group of 8 to 12 year old boys for me to teach. We decided that we would start the workshops in May for around 5 weeks and would also have a exhibition at the end
The city arts centre would not let us exhibit the work in there so I had to find a space to have the exhibition. luckily I knew that the guys at Somewhereto_ had space in Argyle house that I could use and so after contacting them I secured a space for our exhibition.
Bragela also asked if I would be interested in proposing an idea for an interactive arts installation for the childrens museum. I came up with this idea, which she really liked.


Hello I am Amy Bruning and I am currently studying Animation at Edinburgh school of art. I would like to propose an interactive children’s exhibition. My idea for this installation is to have a line drawing either on the wall or on a large sheet of paper that could be coloured in by visiting children. I would like to draw some sort of background, for example a forest. There would also be sheets on paper for the children to draw on, they would draw their own characters to add into the scene. I would then take a drawing either each day or every couple of days depending on how long the exhibition was on for and animate it into the background. We would create a Vimeo and twitter page to keep people updated on what is happening with the installation, it would also allow children to send in drawings of characters if they couldn’t make it to the exhibition. By the end we should have a full short film. 


I also had a some rough visuals and a showreel to show



Showreel from amy bruning on Vimeo.

Hopefully it all goes well and the kids enjoy the exhibition. 


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