Lights, Camera, Action!

The Thursday Night Group at Central Youth club Kensington are writing and creating an animated film. It's to do with the important subject of re-cycling and during our first sessions we looked at some traditional stop motion films like Jason and the Argonauts, the original King Kong and some films by Aardman Animation, the makers of Wallace and Gromit.











There are lots of different parts that go into making an animated film:

1. The first and most important part is the idea.
2. Then we write the story down as a script, this includes all the dialogue or speaking parts and what happens.
3. Design, we’re going to make a stop-motion animation using models that we will build ourselves. We have to decide between us what the characters will look like.
4. When we have a good script written and characters designed the next part is to make a storyboard. This looks a bit like a comic but with directions for all the people involved.
5. Next we need to record the voices for the characters in our animation. Some people will be really good at doing superhero voices and some will be good at making models, some will get involved with writing the script others will enjoy being an animator.
6. When we have the voices recorded and models have been built then we can look at our storyboard and start animating. This is when we use the camera to photograph our models as we move them around and make them live.
7. Finally we can add sound effects and music, this is great fun and some of you might want to get involved.

We already have a good idea. to start off with, our film will be to do with re-cycling.

We have two main characters;
The first is a kind of cheesey Super-Hero who really wants to tell the world about re-cycling.

The other is called Stinky, he can’t see the point of re-cycling-he's a bit lazy.

Cartoon Types

In cartoons there are a few different types of character design that people watching will recognise straight away.

A cute character Looks a bit like a baby. Large head compared to his body. Small nose and mouth Short arms and legs pot belly.

A Dopey character is usually bent forward with a Long skinny neck, a Big nose and Big feet. This type could be good for the naughty character in our film. The Heroic type has Broad shoulders, a Big chest sticking out, Long legs and arms with a Smallish head.

This is what our hero may look like??? Some of us had a go at designing our main (super-hero) character, we then put all the drawings onto the table and decided which parts of each design we might use when we build the model for animation. Everyone liked the spikey hair on one! Also the Logo with wheelie bin, Six pack tummy and a Ragged cape with lots of R’s. Click to make bigger.







This is the rough design we came up with for our main character. Good Eh! We looked at how some cartoon characters have catchphrases that they say in each show.

Homer Simpson says “Doh!”

Bugs Bunny says “Whats up doc!”

Tweety says “I tawt I saw a puddycat!”

Road Runner says “Meep Meep”

Daffy Duck says “Sufferin’ suckertash!”

Fred Flintstone says “Yabbadabbadoo!”

The Incredible Hulk says “You won’t like me when I’m angry!”

Tony the Tiger says “They’re GERRREAT!”

Some characters, like Morph, don’t say anything at all!

We had some ideas for our Hero’s catchphrase:

“Remember the three R’s” “Reduce, Reuse, Re-cycle!”

Reduce - Cut the amount of stuff you use in the first place and have less stuff to throw away.

Reuse means use things again like refilling containers instead of buying new containers full.

Re-cycle means use old things to make new things. >