Term Three Inquiry

Kia Mau Ki Ngā Kōrero Tuku Iho

Holdfast to the knowledge that is passed down from generation to generation

Mr Bron wrote to us today and issued us with a bit of a challenge.

He would like us to make animations of Māori legends so we can preserve the stories for future generations.

There is a lot to learn in order to complete this challenge but first, we need to find out what we already know…

Watch the video all about Māori animators...

Link

Why now's the time for Māori to get into Aotearoa's gaming and tech sector

Wonder

In groups we completed our brainstorm sheet before coming back together to compiling

all our ideas. We know quite a few legends already so that’s great! Some of us are already

pretty good with animating but we could see there was still a lot of learning to be done!

Let’s get started!

Here is what we collectively came up with...

Explore

Over the next three weeks, we will be rotating through each of the workshops run by the the teachers.

Mrs Lunn will be teaching us how to do Slideshow animation.
Mrs Whitta will be teaching us how to use Stop Motion animation.
Mr Lion will teach us all about Scratch.

We can’t wait to learn how to code so we can make our animations of our legends.

Explore

With Mrs Lunn, we learnt how to animate characters in Google Slides. Mrs Lunn had made us a slideshow with three levels we needed to complete to become an expert. There was a big of DEBUGGING we needed to do as sometimes, we got told our character to do something wrong eg: Fly out from the top rather than fly IN from the top. We didn't mind getting things wrong. It gave us a chance to try and figure out where we went wrong and to fix our code.

Explore

With Mrs Whitta, we learnt how to animate using Stop Motion. We have learned to make small movements and then take a photo, small movements and take a photo and repeat!! Once they are all put together they create a very funky video. We are focusing on smooth transitions, steady camera work and making sure we have only included our characters and set in the video and eliminated background noise, carpet and other distractions.

Exploring Stop Motion

Exploring Scratch Animation

With Mr Lion, we learned how to animate characters in Scratch. We started with creating a background and adding various characters. Then we had to get the characters to have a conversation. This can be a bit tricky. To get the characters to take turns and not talk over each other we need to use some of our math and debugging skills. As our skills improved, we added in some other tricks like changing backgrounds, hiding, moving, and even sounds.

Reflect

We spent some time reflecting on what we think makes a good animation. Then we came up with some success criteria. We will use these criteria to help guide us in making the perfect animation!

Act

We are nearly set to make our animations. We have decided on our groups, our legend and how we want to animate it.

Link

Storyboarding

We watched a video on how to create a storyboard. A storyboard will help us be organised for when we are making our amination. We learnt about close-up camera shots and wide shots.

Want to know more? ... take a look at this video.