James adjusts his model then captures the shot on camera
Children grow up with cartoons – a big part of their imaginative fantasy life revolves around these larger than life colourful film & TV heroes. How such a figures get to be made and how the programme gets to be filmed probably never occurs to them. It’s a long a labourious task to create just a few minutes footage.
20 children experienced a fast-track workshop led by animator, Paul Felts during Dulwich Festival. Within just 90 minutes, each child produced a talking head animation clip!
Mr Felts and class in the ITC Suite, Dulwich Hamlet
Firstly Mr Felts explained to the captivated group how we started the process: by recording the speech. Each pair of children had to complete the sentence “When i grow up I want to be a …..”. There was an ”elephant”, great white shark”, “doctor who”, “actress” and “animator” amongst the answers.
ready to film our elephants!
Using colourful plasticine, they each set about making just the head of their own invented character. Mr Felts then got them to observe their partners facial expressions whilst saying certain words and vowels and noting the shape of the mouth.
plasticine head and the three separate mouth options
Three separate mouths were made to cover these basic mouth shapes (wide open, ooo shape and closed mouth) and these were then to be stuck on to the head at the appropriate time to match up with the spoken phrase on the recording. They could refer to the speech pattern graph below the camera image on screen to see whether it was a quiet bit (flat line) or a spoken bit (tall wave pattern) and use as a guide to sync to.
Max & Jai matching the visual with the speech pattern
There was certainly no time for messing about, but the children were instantly engrossed in their project and of course grasped the computer instructions straight away. In no time at all, there was the frantic clicking to catch each shot on the small camera, over to the model head for a subtle movement or a quick mouth swap, then click and click again.
working in pairs, Adam & Billy slightly move their "heads" and capture the shot
Mr Felts, with the assistance of Miss Pink are probably at this very moment compiling all the clips together so each participant can see their animation debut on youtube! Watch this space, with their permission we’ll do a DOV update.
Thanks to Dulwich Hamlet Junior School, the expertise of Mr Felts and the assistance of Miss Pink who volunteered their time for this Dulwich Festival 2009 children’s Art Event, organised by Amanda Greatorex.
Loading ...