
Animation tips part 6: Disappearing and Growing

Conseils pratiques partie 6 : Disparition et Grossisement
Just last night I had the pleasure of having a one on one dinner with my daughter. This is a treat on multiple levels:
1) My daughter is an awesome little human, and full of interesting and often hilarious thoughts.
2) She is 5. If you want a fairly unfiltered view and opinion, chalk full of interesting questions and comments…just ask her.
3) She has a 3 year old brother, and as much as we all love him, it’s always nice to get a little one-on-one time.
4) The LEGO movie just came out, and this gave us a very interesting topic of dinner conversation.
Stop-motion is now on the big screen with LEGO… use myCreate or SAM to join the movie stars!
Let me start by mentioning that we were dining at one of the finest of McDonalds in all of Massachusetts. For all of you who may not have recently purchased a happy meal, you may not be aware that they are currently packaged with a super cool holographic LEGO movie cup as the toy. I mention this not to make you jealous, and not to cause you to be flush with envy, but to simply provide you with the back story as to how I entered into an in-depth conversation about stop motion animation, LEGO, film making, and the finer points of how they don’t actually have a chicken coop out back to source the chicken McNuggets.
But enough with the back story. The reason I am sharing this interaction with you is fairly simple: I had the first hand experience of watching my daughter “get it”. It all started with her asking questions about how they made the LEGO characters come to life, which then led into the concept of stop motion and movement through many small parts. As I explained the process, she stopped me and said:
“Like that time you brought The Hulk to life and made him wake you up.”
This made me realize two things:
1) My children watch everything I do.
2) They have a deep desire to figure out how things work, and an intuitive knowledge of creation.
Well, needless to say, this was a great conversation from my perspective, and a great opportunity to get another peak as to how that 5-year-old brain works. In addition to all this, I’m pretty sure that my daughter has convinced herself that I single handedly created the LEGO movie. As much as I told her that I personally had nothing to do with it, she claims that since I know how to animate, and have once spoke with people at LEGO, that I must have had a hand in its creation. While I didn’t have it in me to correct this thought, I did also see another great thing. Through this brief conversation over some McNuggets, I had the chance to watch my daughter put the pieces together, break animation into steps, and learn through play. It was in this moment that I was reassured that iCreate has put together a great learning tool for children, parents, teachers, and everyone. If my daughter can break it down and benefit, we all can.
So with this, I challenge you to reach out to your favorite kid and see what they learn through myCreate or SAM. Better yet, I challenge you to spend some time with it, and see what you come up with.
Keep creating, and never underestimate where your inspiration comes from.
— Jason