Highly Commended

• To design and create an animation based on a biography of a person's life.

Information:

Within literacy, the children were learning about recounts. To develop their understanding of what a recount was, they used an animation called by "The Piano" by Aiden Gibbons. This gave the children scope to explore approaches made by the film maker to create moods, pace and viewpoints.

This inspired the class to devise their own animation based on a character's biography. For this, they developed a storyboard of a character's life. They discussed what the persion should be and what memorable events occured in his/her life time. They negotiated that the character "PJ" was an old famous footballer who had a special football that triggered an array of special memories.

In order to manage the animation the class was split into pairs. Each pair chose a specific scene of PJ's life. For the children to understand how the characters would move throughout the scene they used role play and props. After this, they began to write the storyboards of their scene.

Once the story was complete, the children recorded their story parts in order to narrate the recount. Backdrops were designed and created next, with the children using the Internet for inspiration.

After the sets were finished, the children initially created their characters using modelling clay. When they became unsturdy and dry, the children decided to use figurines from a dolls house instead.

With the help of Redcar and Cleveland CLC in Eston the children used I Can Animate software to begin their animation. A demonstration of the software was given by Mr Nimmo, who manages the centre. Each pair of children had access to an iMac and a video camera and took snapshots of their scene. It took one day to animate the story. Throughout the day the children developed their metalanguage by identifying how colour, light and film angles develop the story. Mr Nimmo and Miss Raw used iMovie to create the final animation.