Animation Potential

Documentary - Animation during KS3 Art Club

Our department has been piloting some extra-curricular animation workshops with KS3 students (mostly year 7) and found a large number of boys interested, which is a change form the past when it has mostly been girls. At first we had over 35 students, but had to cap this number. There was a huge interest in being able to tell a story through stop-frame animation and the fun in being able to create sets, invent characters, add spontaneous elements and, perhaps most interestingly, work constructively as a team. If you want to see the video, please enter the name of the subject that Ms Powell teaches or email me and I'll send you the password. I would be interested in working with other subject teachers to use this process to engage students and help support their learning.

Y7 Animation Club

Group Animation Export, originally uploaded by Fortismere Art & Photography Department.

As part of our Art Club schedule this term, we have asked students Miguel Garcia and Sam Reinders to run an animation club for Year 7 students. The students particularly enjoy stop-frame animation. In this test, they used themselves as human statues to stage a mock fight (their idea??!).

I think that using older students to support with creative projects has a great deal of potential to both alleviate staff from being always responsible for extra-curricular activities and promoting the idea of learners teaching learners i.e. peer mentoring. I believe that the Sixth Form could be used much more constructively across the school.

We are going to try and worm our way into the new Music Block since the iMacs aren't currently used downstairs on a Wednesdays...

Shakespeare Art and Drama Workshop

As part of the 'Drama does the Bard' cross-curricular day where departments worked on delivering lessons that involved drama as a starting point, we created a one-hour workshop in response to 'Antony & Cleopatra'. We started with a simple analysis of the plot and characters using this presentation and responding to the paintings/depictions of the story in art history:Antony and cleopatra

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We gave students an extract from the play that detailed a scene that could be visually interpreted. Year 7 students were asked to work in mixed groups of four and create a 'tableau' where they were photographed and then these were printed out and used as part of a collage to create a projection in the style of artist, Kara Walker:

The final results were good, albeit the whole process was incredibly rushed and would have benefited from at least being a 2-hour workshop. All the art teachers involved felt that this would make a interesting scheme of work and we will try to integrate what we have learnt into next year's programmes of study.

Here are the results:

A&c workshop outcomes

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