Animation Taster

This was an opportunity for participants to explore the fascinating world of animation through a series of short practical workshops and to discover that there is more to animation than Disney!

These taster sessions explored the diversity of animation from a traditional perspective. The introductory sessions introduced a variety of short classic animated films, cartoons and some of Artscope's own past projects. For the group, this was the first viewing of the work of animators like Jan Svankmajer and The Brothers Quay. But it was not a completely dark affair, as classic animations like 'The Moomins' and the work from the fabulous Studio Ghibili of Japan were also on the agenda.

Another taster workshop included exploring the work of Eadweard Muybridge, the man, who not only boasted having a strangely spelt name, but who famously proved a horse could fly! In this unusual workshop the group explored how this optical illusion was created.

What can you see when you spin a card? This was the question posed in another workshop, where the participants created their own unique magical Thaumatrope cards.

Early moving picture books led to the development of cinema. Flipbooks, created with simple marks on paper, provided the building blocks from which moving pictures were produced. By flicking the book’s pages quickly through the fingers, the illusion of rapid movement was thus created.

The group also had the opportunity to touch until stop frame animation, a more complicated technique that involved creating a simple model and photographing it throughout a running sequence of slight movements. Once played back, these individual frames fool the eye into believing that the model is in fact moving. This was how most of the early animated films were created and also contemporary works like 'Wallace and Gromit'.