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.
