Official... "Better than the X-box"!

My blogging has a lot to be desired. Especially as there's been such a lot of great things to report...
so here's a quick catch up...

2) Zoetrope Animation workshops at Cannon Hall

I love inventing animation workshops from museums collections and last month I was given the opportunity to do just that at Cannon Hall Museum and Gardens, a country house museum set in 70 acres of historic parkland. It doesn’t take much to get me excited about animation and museums, but this workshop was a real highlight of my year and a very special workshop.

Funded by the Arts Council, a huge number of school children will be invited into the museum over the next 2 years to discover the beautiful collections and practice all manor of creative arts.

I hunted around the museum for a day, looking for inspiration for a 2 hour animation workshop. I found my inspiration in a glass bowl, which on close inspection, I discovered featured a running lioness and cub. Could it be this was an example of sequential animation, actually in the museums collection? I got very excited about this and we arranged for a photographer to come and photograph each engraving. I then took those images into an edit to covert them into a movie. And gosh, is it breathtaking. Here’s a video of the animation.

Now, not only is this utterly AMAZING, but it reminded me of one of the earliest examples of animation, depicted on a 2000 year old Iranian clay pot. And of course it reminded me of the Zoetrope.

So being utterly spoilt, we were able to create a really exciting Zoetrope workshop with a historical and scientific underpinning.

In an age of technological innovation and ipads, traditional hand made workshops are sometimes forgotten, and doing these pilots, using cardboard, paper plates and a pencil, made me remember that good old hands on invention can’t be beaten. And that’s not a 30 something fuddy duddy talking. That’s the children. My quote of the week came from a child who simply wrote – Better than the xbox!

Look out for examples from the zoetrope pilot workshops at Barnselys new city museum this summer.