The other day, one of my sixth graders asked me if I had ever used Pivot for animation, which led to an interesting discussion about how this freeware software could be used with MovieMaker to create a little animated film.
So I figured I would try it out and now I am hoping to let my students try their hand before the school year runs out (soon!) and also to use this very simple, yet cool, software as an introduction to the Claymation Animation Camp that my wife and I are running this summer for the very first time (gulp).
Here, then, is the premiere of The Incredibly Crazy Clocks, using Pivot to create the animation (it comes out as an animated .gif file), then I imported the file into MovieMaker where I added some original music of mine, and a title, an I got a mini-movie.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=6106772181624048098" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]
Peace (frame by frame by frame),
Kevin
Hurrah! I love Pivot. I think is just brilliant software for using with kids and great for introducing the concept of stop frame animation.
A few months ago I set up a wiki http://animateourworld.wikispaces.com/
to create an online project using pivot. I haven’t done anything with it yet but your post today was a prompt to go back to it. I’ll post on my blog some of the pivots created by children I’ve been working with.
Cheers
Kevin,
I taught this to my sixth graders in April and May and then we had a mini film festival complete with popcorn. We sent out invitations to the principal and teachers, etc. They had to start by creating the story with a story board. Then they went to Paint to create the background that went with the story. Finally they created the scenes in Pivot. These kids were so excited using pivot that a lot of them went home and downloaded it there. They were learning things I didn’t know and then came back and taught the class themselves! Learning at its best! We saved it as a GIF and imported it into MovieMaker so that the entire student body could see it as part of our weekly news broadcast. Great program. Next I am going to learn how to use Scratch so I can use it next year!
hi Cheryl
As it turns out, this weekend, I downloaded and started to use Scratch a bit. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but I like how it shows how coding can happen with a computer program, and the lego-lock approach is kind of cool.
Here is my quick experiment: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/dogtrax/9813
(I think that is the address — it’s not clear from the site)
Kevin