>>Have any of you secondary people started teaching an animation class? I
like McCay's early work but don't know what programs would do flip book work
like he did by hand. I think it would be cell by cell.<<
I'm not a secondary teacher, but I can tell you about a simple solution that
I worked out after a suggestion from a school district technology assistant
when I was teaching elementary grades.
After working with Jim McNeill to create the video "Dropping in on
Rousseau," I wanted to figure out a way to teach electronic animation in the
classroom. Cost of animation software was prohibitive at the time, so I had
to use software that was on hand. The solution was offered by the district
technology assistant: PowerPoint.
We all know that PowerPoint is a slide-type software, but I had never
thought about using it to create animation. If you create multiples of the
same image, set the timer to automatic and the speed to zero, you'll create
a moving image.
Jim and a master teacher from North Texas will be teaching this process in a
workshop at the TAEA conference next month. Those of you attending the
conference will want to consider this workshop. It's sure to be worthwhile.
I have a sample of animation from the Rousseau video that has been
transferred to PowerPoint. The sample uses quite a few individual images to
make Puffer (the central character in the video) fly up and down for just a
few seconds. It's a super demonstration to show how many frames are needed
for a second of animation.
The sample is a fairly large file, but maybe Judy could post it to IAD.
Sorry ... I do not have a lesson summary for this.