Aideen Barry
Animation Magic
15th May 2017
4th Classes

In Aideen Barry's workshops she invited participating children to make individual drawing animations and a collaborative stop-motion animation. For her drawing animation workshop she showed the students some of her animations including a work titled Levitating where she appeared to be hovering above the surface of the ground as she went about her day. She asked the children how they thought she created this effect. One student correctly suggested that she took a series of photos of herself jumping and then pieced them together to create an animation. She told them that it took 12 images to make one second of an animation. Giving the students 12 sheets of animation paper she asked them to close their eyes and imagine something happening in the garden that they could turn into an animation - ants battling, spiders spinning, flowers growing, worms wriggling....She talked them through each step of the process by showing them a one-second animation she had made. When the children had their drawings complete Aideen photographed each one and used istopmotion to turn the drawings into animations. In her next workshop the class watched Possession - a work of Aideen's in which a character (the artist) appeared to be slicing a loaf of bread with a mechanical garage door - and MUTO - an animation created from drawings on public walls by Brazilian artist BLU. Aideen and the class discussed how these were made with a series of still images. The class then made a collaborative stop-motion animation using cardboard boxes as props.

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ANIMATIONS

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STUDENT FEEDBACK

'I liked that when we drew the picture came alive like magic. I learned that you can draw and then put it on the computer and it can become real'

- Student, 10

'I really liked the short film Levitating and the one where she was eating the cake and I loved that we could make our own cartoons'

- Student, 10

'I enjoyed making films because I enjoy drawing and now I am making films at home. I learned that cartoons are made from pictures'

- Student, 10

'It was fun when we did the animations on the computer. I liked when she showed us her animations. I learned that animations are magic'

- Student, 10

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