Edinburgh Short Film Festival Workshop
Who was the workshop for?
As part of the Edinburgh Short Film Festival 2023, I ran a stop motion animation workshop. The workshop was made possible to Screen Scotland, and was open to everyone. It was a fantastic opportunity for anyone with an interest in film-making, but who might not have had a go at stop motion before.
The workshop’s aims were to provide an introduction stop motion with an exploration of techniques, animation concepts, and to give lots of advice along the way.
How were the activties were created?
I decided on using plasticine (claymation) as the focus for the workshop as it is synonymous with stop motion, inexpensive, readily available in art shops, and there are endless ways it can be animated. I devised activities that would enable people at the workshop to explore morphing, the replacement technique and character animation.
To encourage people to go on to make films after the workshop, everyone got to take home their plasticine models.
I knew time at the workshop was going to fly by (especially in the world of stop motion!), so I part-made things for people to animate.
Here is some of the preparation I did for the workshop, plus demonstration animations that I created:
Animations I created for this workshop:
Wonderful feedback about the workshop:
Here are the animations made at the workshop. To download, see instructions below.
To download the animation, click on ‘link to download’. Then, from the Vimeo page click this button:
Well done to everyone who came!
We look forward to seeing you again next year. The plan is to run film surgeries as an opportunity to show us animations that you have been working on since the workshop and we will offer suggestions for improvements and further stop motion techniques to try.
