BBC Bitesize Animation Class Clips is a great site to visit as part of an animations project.
There are 12 clips giving great ideas for animation projects:
This is a tutorial of how to use a digital photo of one’s pet and add it to a photo of one’s own body! Lots of children would appreciate this one!
- Animating on a Real-Life Backdrop
This is a short animation made using a submarine drawn on acetate and a real life backdrop. The submarine is drawn on acetate and photographed against a real river but I think in class it would be easier using a video of a moving river.
This is the old favourite – a basic introduction to flip-book animation using just a pen and pack of memo notes. A bit of a cheat I feel!
This shows how to animate pictures, photographs or cuttings from magazines to create moving images. This one is great fun and fairly easily achieved in class. There are so many images available online this could be done even without loads of magazines or postcards.
How to make an animation using images attached to a rotating bike wheel. This one is probably for home animations rather than in school!
This is making a frame within which all of the animation takes places; it is fairly small and neat, it may be a useful technique in the classroom.
This one shows how to make a figure drawn on sticky notes run across a wall using stop-frame animation. Again, it is a non digital method but could be used as a starter to experiment with the technique.
This is fun! It shows how to make a biscuit climb up a tea caddy and dive into a cup of tea. A demonstration of animating inanimate objects!
This is a great follow on if you do any seed growing next spring. Many of us have grown cress heads etc – this is using grass, which would work just as well and animating the “hair”. How to make and animate a tufty head garden character using old tights and grass seeds.
10. Squash and Stretch Animation
Children will be well aware of clay animation with Wallace and Gromit and the animals videos. This video shows how to achieve the squash and stretch as if it is in a huge leap of a bouncing ball. This one is simply using camera and tablets along with the clay. They are very clean and tidy animation demonstrations whereas some animations can take over complete areas of the room.
- Stop-Motion Animation of a Beard Unraveling
Putting together a stop-motion animation showing a man’s beard appearing to unravel. A fun technique but may not be possible in the classroom!
This one is much more classroom oriented, I can easily imagine children achieving something along these lines. In pairs, it is one person using the other as a skateboard, so all stop-motion but perfectly doable in the playground.