The School Network

When you log onto the school network the screen has folders on it.

Open the Curriculum ICT folder

The little 'stickman' called pivot is a simple animation program. try it out. If you like it you can download your own copy at home. ...

Here is an example of what you can do... most of the examples seem to follow computer games - fights etc. There are lots of tutorials on You Tube telling you how to make various moves. You are only limited by your own imagination.

The cat's head takes you to a program called 'Scratch'. That also is free to download. Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. You work with 'sprites' in this software and it is fun to play with - however, you cannot save your work in a format that will allow you to use it with DiDA - so for your animation it is not much use for that. It is fun though! There are tutorials on You Tube that show you how to use it.

Now look in the macromedia file.

There are sections on this site to show you how to use Fireworks (a graphics package to help you manipulate and create graphic images - including animated gifs) and Flash (a program that enables you to make interactive animated swf files).

You can use the left hand menu bar to jump to those sections.

Close that folder and return to the Curriculum ICT folder. Now open Animator8 - 3D

This is a program that you can use at school - but you could download a copy for free for your own computer (I cannot use it on my Windows 7 system - but you might have better luck!). Look the the site - remember to carefully check the software for viruses before you install it.... but Mr. Del-Manso found it was okay for our system.

There are a wealth of examples of how users have made graphics and videos using it on the site - but these give you a taster of what you can do with it!