An Introduction to Animation

About this unit:

Get really creative as you introduce both 2D and stop frame animation. Students will love creating their own animated clips and stories with a variety of tools.

National Curriculum Links - Computing KS1

The content of this plan cover the following National Curriculum strands:

use technology purposefully to create, organise, store, manipulate and retrieve digital content
use technology safely and respectfully

Curriculum Mapping

Why this? What does it build on?

This unit is another example of students working with multimedia content. They will be using a range of tools to create their own animations using digital drawings and stop-motion films with objects and figures. It links brilliantly with literacy lessons on storytelling and sequencing and builds on the Year 1 units Making multimedia stories, where students can animate the movement of objects in their work, and the drawing skills they will develop in An introduction to digital art.

What comes next?

Students will approach animation in a different way, through coding in our Year 2 unit Programming with Scratch Jr, and then again in more depth in our KS2 unit, Animation with Scratch. Our scheme of work also contains a wide range of units that cover different ways of creating and editing multimedia digital artifacts which will also build on the skills developed in this unit. In KS2 they will cover Digital Imagery: Patterns in nature, 3D Design, Manipulating Sound, Creating Instructional videos, and Manipulating images.

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Take a look at our full curriculum map to see how units across all year groups, from Year 1 to Year 6 link.

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Unit Resources

Lesson Slides

Detailed lesson slides for you to use when delivering this unit of work with your class

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Unit Assessment Sheet

Use our simple assessment system to measure your students' success in this unit of work.

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Lessons

Lesson 1

To understand that animation is a collection of still images to make moving images.
To create a simple 2D animation

Getting started; making pictures move

Lesson 2

To explain what a frame is
To use a variety of drawing tools appropriately
Improve the quality of animations with onion skinning and the select tool

2Animate advanced tools

Lesson 3

To use a variety of drawing tools appropriately
To successfully use the ‘Inbetweening’ tool to create a simple animation.

Adding details

Lesson 4

To compare 2D and stop motion animation.
To experiment with stop motion animation.
To work successfully in a team

Stop Motion Fun

Lesson 5

To create a smooth stop motion animation by moving objects in small steps
To make two or more figures interact in a stop motion animation.
To work successfully in a team

Fantastic Figures 1

Lesson 6

To create a smooth stop motion animation by moving objects in small steps
To plan and tell a simple story with stop motion animation.
To work successfully in a team

Fantastic Figures 2

Suggested Software

2Animate (from Purple Mash or the 2Simple Collection)
iMotion app

Full Computing Glossary

Take a look at our full computing glossary, plus key vocabulary for each age group.

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Key computing vocabulary for this unit

Alter - to change the way something looks, sometimes using a computer or other digital tools

Animation - Combining a series of still images to give the illusion of movement when the images are shown as a sequence

Capture - (in film or animation) To take a photograph or video recording

Export - To take a saved file out of a piece of software so that it can be placed or used in a different location

Edit - To change, add or remove elements in a piece of work (usually to improve it).

Evaluate - To make a judgement about a piece of work, usually against a set of predetermined criteria.

Frame - A single drawing or photograph in an animation

Save - To store a piece of work in a computer’s memory so that it can be recalled at a later time.