Fun On Friday #154: Stacheify

It is now more than half way through Movember and both my Mo, and money raised, are coming along nicely. But thanks to Daughter Number One, my attention was drawn to an app that provides a hint about the shape of Moes to come:

It is called Stacheify and it reminds me a bit of CrazyTalk in the way it let's you identify key features (eyes and mouth) in a still photograph and then manipulates the image to create an animation.

• Mo-bros: your Moes should already be well established.
• Mo-sistas: Show your support with Stacheify.

And don't forget to donate to Movember.

Fun On Friday #130: Elf Yourself

Late again I know... but here's the first Fun On Friday of Advent.

It's an old favourite - Elf Yourself is back and it's bigger and better than ever. This year, I've gone for the singing option.

If you elf yourself, share a link here so we can all enjoy.

Update: Not sure how I missed this, but thanks to Daughter Number 2, here's a link to the Elf Yourself eCard maker.

Better than Elf Yourself?

Fun On Friday #123: Dinosaur songs

Short and sweet this week. A video that Daughter Number 1 brought to my attention:

My favourite bit is where the dinosaur is stomping on the car and it's owner at the 1:12 mark - does that make me a bad person?

A flip chart pop-up book. An interesting class project?

Fun On Friday #120: Toontastic

What we did on our holidays - by Daughter Number 2. (It's a bit slow to load at first but stick with it!):

Brilliant, isn't it.?

Created in Toontastic - possibly my favourite iPad App at the moment. You move the puppets, you speak, you make a movie. Excellent! Daughter Number 2 drew her own puppets but there are loads of great pre-drawn models, with moveable limbs. (For example, see Pirates.)

When you tap the button to create a story, the App suggests you make five scenes:

1. Setup;
2. Conflict;
3. Challenge;
4. Climax;
5. Resolution.

Some great teaching points there even before you start but all wrapped up in a bundle of the best fun ever!

Do you have any examples of classes using this app? How did you use it and what did the pupils make of it?

Fun On Friday #114: Animation

Now I know this is late but I couldn't have posted this on Friday because I only got the Dundee Degree Show 2011 (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design) on Saturday.

There was a lot of good stuff at the Degree Show this year and the usual collection of odd stuff but it was mostly mostly impressive. (As an example of the odd, at one point I looked out a window and saw a hole in the ground surrounded traffic cones. I wondered if it was art or just a hole in the ground. Anyone want to guess which it was?) As before though, I really liked the animation work. The animations are short and the ideas could sometimes do with a bit more work but the art and animation is of a very high standard!

There is a website which groups all the animations together, the Animation 2011 site, and you can not only watch the videos there but there are also links to the production blogs for the projects (I assume these were part of the assessment?) and often links to the students' own websites. Some of the animations are also posted on YouTube which means I can display one of them here:

Across the films there is a mixture of hand drawn and computer animation techniques but it was interesting to see the sketches and life drawings at the exhibition that showed where the work came from and how the ideas came to life.

What do you think of these films and what's your favourite animation?

Fun On Friday #111: Viral Videos

Last week, the Times published an article that it billed as "The 40 Best Viral Videos". Number 1 was David after dentist which has been seen umpteen million times but didn't do it for me. Next was Battle At Kruger which was a sort of amateur Wildlife On One style video of a square go between a herd of buffalos and a pride of lions which is more interesting in a car crash kind of a way.

Number three though was Human Tetris - now that's more like it:

Brilliant, and if you want to see more of the same, head over to Game Over. Stop motion animation on steroids!

Fun On Friday #110: Easter

For many people, Easter means chocolate... So for them, here's a recipe for Creme Egg pancakes!

If you want to go beyond chocolate and bunnies, you could always try these four Easter related animations:


Happy Easter!

Fun On Friday #101: Lego Star Wars

I've posted about Lego animation before (e.g. Fun on Friday #76: Brick-by-brick fussball) and I've posted about DIY animations of Star Wars before (Fun on Friday #69: Crowd Sourced Movies). Well, today, we have the original Star Wars trilogy told with Lego in just over 2 minutes. Brilliant!

I love the description of the Ewoks at around the 1:40 mark of the video.

I'm impressed at how well the trilogy is summarised with the main points covered and a fair bit of humour and the animator's personality in evidence too. I suspect this is a whole new genre of animation I will now have to explore - great movie trilogies summarised. Anyone know where I can find The Godfather told in Lego?

Fun On Friday #94: Advent Craft 2

Last year I linked to Elf Yourself and the year before to Critter Carols. This year I thought I'd go for a DIY approach.

First, choose a photograph. I chose this one of my dog in the snow.

Next, go to Picnik and use it to edit your picture. (You can upload the picture from your hard disk or edit it directly from one of a number of online photo sites including Flickr and facebook.) Use the Create tab and the Holiday Fun tools to add Christmas stuff to your photo. Here is my Picniked picture of Blue: Red Nosed Reindog.

Finally, go to Blabberize and add a message to create your own animated Christmas greeting.

Not as slick and polished as Elf Yourself of Critter Carols but all your own work!

Have fun! And please share anything you create by leaving a comment on this post.

Fun On Friday #90: A Nags Arm

Short and sweet this week.

Go to the Internet Anagram Server, type a word or phrase into the find anagrams box and generate some anagrams. Now choose an anagram you like the look of, copy it and follow the Anagram Animation link at the top, right-hand side of the page. Type in the original text, paste in the anagram chosen earlier, and generate an animated anagram.

Brilliant!

Fun on Friday #77: Fun With Music

The Tone Matrix web site says it is a: "Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map..." Sounds exciting? ...No, it doesn't attract me either. But go to the site, turn up the volume, click some squares and now tell me you are not having fun!

Screenshot of ToneMatrix

And while we are on musical fun... have you ever been Rickrolled? Have you been Rickrolled in type? No? Well have a look at Dancing Typography!

[Note: Since this is the last school day before the holidays in Scotland, this will be the last (official) Fun On Friday for a while.]

Fun on Friday #76: Brick-by-brick fussball

I'm not a huge football fan but I am a fan of both Lego and animation. So Lego animation is a wining combination in my book... even when the animation is football based:

It seems a shame to focus on England's opening match of the 2010 World Cup when there are happier times that are also recorded in Lego: Brick-by-brick fussball: England v West Germany.

Are there other sporting events that could be recorded in Lego?

Fun on Friday #74: 222 T-shirts

Thanks to a video that was brought to my attention by Daughter Number 2, I return to animation as the subject for a Fun On Friday:

I discovered that this video features on a top ten list of stop-motion animations on the Mashable site. All ten are impressive but the t-shirt one is my favourite.

Now it may be that you are intimidated rather than inspired by videos like this as videos this complex may be beyond the resources of most schools. However, I am sure that pupils can come up with ideas that are just as creative.

As always, if you know of good school produced examples, please share them here.

Fun on Friday #69: Crowd Sourced Movies

Last week, I posted a link to some animated movies. However, as was pointed out by Chris in her comment, creating stop-motion animation is a very time consuming process. I quoted in my reply the chap who did the Michael Jackson video who said his five minute animation took him "About 2 1/2 weeks, 4 or 5 hours a day." That's a lot of time to invest in producing a five minute video! Can you imagine producing a feature length movie?

Perhaps the solution is to crowdsource the whole thing. ...And that's what Star Wars Uncut has done. They took Star Wars: A New Hope (which despite George Lucas' best efforts, I still think of as the first Star Wars movie) and split it up into 500 clips, each 15 seconds long. People were then invited to recreate up to three 15 second clips.

To give you an idea of what people did, here are two of my favourites:

Star Wars Uncut - Scene 093 from Ed Bear on Vimeo.

Star Wars Uncut - Scene 302 from Doug Vander Hoek on Vimeo.

Other favourites include Scene 7 (Lego animation and a fantastic explosion), Scene 8 (a brilliant interpretation involving Ninja Turtles as the Rebel Forces) and Scene 349 (a cartoon with a surprise cameo appearance at the end).

My only problem is, I can't decide if this is crazy, or a work of genius. What do you think? And, what's your favourite scene?

Fun on Friday #68: Music and Animation

If I don't get my act together soon, I'll need to change the name of the blog to FunCompBlog.

Animation had featured a few times in this blog (e.g. Fun on Friday #57: Who's in charge here?, The BEds Get Animated and Fun on Friday #27: SAM Animation) as has music (e.g. Fun on Friday #58: Lip Dub and British Sign Language).

Today's Fun On Friday (brought to you as is becoming traditional on Saturday) brings animation and music videos together in 10 Best LEGO Music Videos on YouTube.

My favourite is the OK Go video:

Perhaps I like it best because I am familiar with the original (see Why weren't my PE lessons like this?) but I think it is particularly well done. My only problem is that it finishes after one minute.

What's your favourite? Do you know of any others? Are you inspired to try something like this with a class?

Fun on Friday #57: Who's in charge here?

This is great fun. If you enjoy it half as much as me, then I'll have enjoyed it twice as much as you!

Animator vs Animation

What do you think?

The BEds Get Animated

This is the last post, for now, on the work of the BEd Computers, Creativity and Education class. The final session was on stop-motion animation. (For the other posts, see The BEd Students Tell A Story and The BEds are back... and this time they're podcasting.)

As with many of the other sessions, we started with a brief presentation on the value of pupils creating animations and its potential educational value. There was then a quick demonstration of the animation software - we used the wonderfully simple, yet very powerful, I Can Animate. The students then formed into two groups and started work.

In the space of about 80 minutes, they had to film their animation and then import it into iMovie. In iMovie they added sound effects, music and titles. Given the time constraints they were working under, I think both groups produced fun animations that tell a story. Hopefully they will have seen that, although it is time consuming, the ICT skills required to create an animation are not hugely complex.

If you have any suggestions or examples on how animation can be used effectively, please leave a comment. I am sure the students would be glad to hear from you.

Fun on Friday #51: It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Christmas...

As I explained on my music blog, I realised that there are now only four Fridays to Christmas. By my reckoning, that makes this the first Fun on Friday in advent. :-)

I will do my best to post something Christmas related or the next four Fridays. However, it has got off to a bad start as the more astute among you will have realised that it is now Saturday!

To start us off, here is a perennial favourite that I've mentioned before: Elf Yourself is back... and back with new songs and backgrounds.

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Does the re-appearance of Elf Yourself mark the start of the Christmas season? If you Elf Yourself, remember to share the results here.

I hope you enjoy the next few Fun on Fridays!

Fun on Friday #27: SAM Animation

Animation! Or more to the point: free animation software! :-)

I've written before about animation (Fun on Friday #12: Go animate!) and I do a fair bit with students (More from the creative BEds). Whenever I demonstrate creating stop motion animation, students always ask where they can get animation software. I used to recommend I Can Animate. In fact, I still will recommend I Can Animate - it's a great piece of software which is fairly cheap but stunningly good at what it does. However, the next thing I tend to be asked is, "Are there any free programs that do this?", as they play the poor student card. Up until now, I've said, "Not really." but now, I can tell them about SAM Animation.

SAM Animation is great wee program that is available as a free download for Macintosh and Windows. The interface looks a bit clunky (at least it does in the Macintosh version) and it does not recognise the built-in camera on my iMac (not much use for animation anyway) but it is free and it does what it does with the minimum of fuss. Well worth every penny you don't have to spend on it.

The program seems to be primarily intended for schools and educators. For example, the developers seem to be trying to create a community of users with a YouTube-esque Gallery and a wiki with Classroom Activity ideas.

So, if this latest flu virus brings about the aporkolypse, and you end up hiding indoors away from human contact, make sure you have downloaded SAM Animation and at least you can amuse yourself by making pasticine animations of a sneeze while you wait for the symptoms to develop and/or disappear. :-)

[Addendum: I fully intended to have a "proper" entry before the return of Fun on Friday... but the best laid schemes, gang aft agley - especially when you're suffering from sleep deprivation!]

Fun on Friday #12: Go animate!

There are educational uses of this tool. For example, I've seen it used to teach both French and Maths. However, I've used it to tell a joke (for a very loose interpretation of the word "joke"):



{Credit where credit is due. I stole the joke from Katie Barrowman - I think!}

I like this tool but could do with a bit more information on how it all works. They clearly want to make this a child/school safe resource because when I initially tried to save my joke, was prevented from doing so and was told "Please avoid using bad word". This confused me more than a little. Eventually I worked out it was my description that was causing the problem. I initially typed: "This is what passes for humour amongst nerds. :-)" - can you spot the bad word? {Question to Mrs Blethers, and anyone else that wants to comment, should that be "amongst" or "among"?}

If you have a go - make sure you leave a comment here with a link to your creation. Have some fun this Friday... you know you want to.