Tangram Animation

Whilst tidying up the hard drive on my computer I came across a number of half baked animation projects from some sessions I ran at my kids' junior school. One of the projects was this simple tangram animation which was filmed on a Digital Blue camera by some 9 year olds.

As we only had a couple of cameras at the time, this project worked well in a round robin fashion with each child being able to choose the tangram character they wished to animate. I think we did create a longer film, but I don't appear to have that at home.

I've decided to give the project a makeover, this time by lighting from below to give the effect of a shadow play. I've experimented with this style before using a Digital Blue camera, but I wanted to see if there were any improvements that could be made now that I have upgraded to a Microsoft Lifecam camera and ZU3D software. Here is the result:

The technique involves mounting the camera above a lightbox. The lightbox I use is small (size A4) but perfectly adequate and ideal for use with children. For more details please see my website, here.

My animation station!

In the past I have cut out the foreground scenery from black card and stuck it directly onto the lightbox. However, the ZU3D software allows images to be imported and placed on a separate track to your stop motion frames. This has made things a whole lot easier. It also means that more elaborate scenery can be designed. I created this background image in GIMP (the white parts are actually transparent) and saved it as a PNG file sized 640 x 480 pixels to match the default dimensions for my camera in ZU3D.

Scenery - click to enlarge, save and then import directly into your project.

 and then imported it into ZU3D:

I then added another video track below the scenery and started to capture frames. The green hue was provided by green cellophane placed on the lightbox (we didn't use this in the end). I used to be able to get a similar effect using the Digiblue's software, but I can't seem to find such a feature in ZU3D. Oh well, you win some, you lose some!

I have been so pleased with the way that this has turned out and hope to come up with some more project ideas for the future.

The small tangram characters were all printed onto black card and cut out. This can be tricky to see, especially for a child; an easier method is to print onto white paper and then transfer to the card by rubbing white crayon or pencil onto the back.

Here are all of the characters used in the film - right click to save. Searching on the internet will reveal lots more that you can copy.

And here is the tangram square used to create the transformation animations:

Right click, save and print onto black card.