Pre-school animation

[Dumdidumdidumdidum]

I am a full time teacher,soon to take redundancy as our school is closing. This is in order to develop my business, stop motion animation, primarily children use lego and show final films at a private cinema viewing each term. I do these after school, but won't make enough just doing that. So I thought how about using Duplo for pre-school children at community centres and the like. I could also gear it to early years foundation learning (but first and foremost, a fun activity). I provide all the laptops, gear etc and children take their mini films home on a stick. Thought about £5 for a one hour session. Would this interest people? Thoughts greatly appreciated!

Hiya, I'm not a mum yet but if I was I'd think this was a great idea; my friend is an occupational therapist but branched out doing baby massage and toddler gym/yoga/dance and got in touch with her local sure start centre - there's even grants available from central government for family centres to host these kinds of activities so Definately worth investigating.
You could also do parties.
I wish you all the best x

I think your expectations of pre-school children are overly optimistic.

Thanks Bellabutterfly! Take your point SoupDragon, but they will have a mum or dad with them, could be nice bonding time?

No, they will get bored and the parents will get frustrated. Absolutely not nice bonding time at all IMO.

SoupDragon, you seem very sure of this. Do you have experience in this field? Interested to hear of your experience.

I could see it could possibly work, but how much of the hour long session would the children actually be doing something? How many sets of equipment would you have? I have done a similar thing with my DC but they were about 10 and 8 (multiple sets of equipment and several facilitators so we had it explained to us and then we got on with it). It was still moderately frustrating due to the amount of shots you need to take to make even a short film. I imagine with younger Children it would be more so.

Very true Miranda! I have up to 25 sets of equipment (laptops, cameras, baseboard, softboxes and a shedload of minifigures etc but would have to invest in a load of Duplo!) - but I thought children could follow a simple build idea (or create their own) and mum/dad could click to take a shot periodically as the build develops - so more a time-lapse situation than a film with narrative. The other idea is doing builds and having a lovely photo taken at the end, other activities would be involved as well, as I'm sure focus on 1 activity won't work for an hour at these ages!

I work in gifted and talented education (not in the UK) and this is exactly the sort of thing we offer children. That might be something you could look at.

The company I work for also runs a sort of holiday program where we rent space in schools in the holidays and run programs like yours, employing the presenters who like you run their own programs and provide their own resources.

That's really interesting SavoyCabbage, could you tell me the web address?

Do you have experience in this field?

I have had experience of running activities for preschoolers. They tend to have the attention span of a gnat and want instant gratification. IME they (in general) can't cope with the time needed to do anything other than straightforward craft activities.

I simply think you are pitching your idea too young.

As an aside, MN generally doesn't allow people to conduct free business research.

It's an intriguing idea but I agree far too ambitious for preschoolers even with parents helping. I tend to think it's better to leave things until children are older rather than push too early.

I'm interested in making stop motion films with lego though - we are in the early stages of arranging some events at the local library and this kind of activity would be ideal but no idea who to ask!

ProfessorBraneatwn - you'll need gaffa tape to keep the setup secure, webcams (preferably with an option to override auto-focus, eg logitech pro 9000, about £35 each), lego baseboards, the children could presumably bring their own lego to animate, a backboard or softbox (cardboard would do if on a budget, you could print backgrounds onto it). There are cheap animation software options available, you'll have to google it. I'm afraid I use Stop Motion Pro, which is about £150 per machine (But the £50 version would probably do), but it's the full package for animating - used by Aardman Animations but at a higher spec than we use! As a general rule amateurs tend to shoot at 15 frames per second, and a resolution of 800 x 600 or higher would be great. Hope that helps!

Thanks for the help SavoyCabbage!