Projects

Lees and Margaret McMillan Primary Schools

Project Outline

Students from the two schools worked on this series of short animated films. Two classes of Year 4 students worked with animator Emma Lazenby to create the final moving image work.

Preparation and Planning

Lees and Margaret McMillan Primary Schools worked with Cartwright Hall for a full day to explore paintings and produce their own artworks, drawing inspiration directly from the work exhibited. This day was an introduction to the animated work the groups would create during the coming weeks.

To help students make connections between the cut-out and silhouette animation techniques they would use, the painting Nursery Rhymes For Dmitri (1997) by Balraj Khanna was selected to be the focus for the day's activities, as the work is constructed from multiple cut-out shapes.

Students looked around the gallery before working on ideas around this one piece. Small groups of children worked together looking at colour, shape and words associated with the various elements they had identified in the artwork.

The groups then went on to construct a nonsense sentence or rhyme using the words and objects they had written down. Groups invented sentences, which contained amongst other things, 'Unicorns brushing their white manes and eating ice cream, shivering blue fish swimming in the sea and giant carrots eating cheese!'

The children had been working on rhyme and verse construction during school time and we wanted them to build on this work, drawing inspiration from the artwork they had seen. The children were then asked to translate their written work into a visual sentence, constructing all the elements in the sentence. Each student selected a different object or creature from the sentence. All the cut outs were painted and students worked with the colours they had discussed in their groups to create a colour scheme.

Once painted, the creations were displayed in a line, echoing the design of the exhibited work by Balraj Khanna. The children created their own visual sentences and were able to discuss them with the rest of the group.

Animation Method >