As part of Seattle Children’s collaboration with Children’s Film Festival Seattle, professional animators Charlotte Blacker from England and Britta Johnson from Seattle offered two days of animation workshops to hospital patients.
With short stories featuring a wide range of objects and characters from aliens, exploding stars to “banana slips”, patients’ imaginations came alive as they created their stop motion animation films.
To make the films each patient came up with a story idea, made their characters or objects that would be in their film and then moved them in small increments between individually photographed frames. Once the frames were played together as a continuous sequence, their animation was born.
Twelve-year-old Lauren Selden, who created the animation “Scarf” using pipe cleaner critters, really enjoyed the experience.
“It was fun to learn how to do animation, learn the process and see how it turned out in the end,” she said.
Will Krajewski, 13, who incorporated a clay snowman that he made in his animation, also had fun learning the animation process.
“It was surprising to see how many times you had to move the object to make the film,” he said. “It was also neat to see how it all comes together at the end.”
All of the animated films created by the patients were shown at the closing ceremony of the film festival on Sunday, February 3. You can watch them in the video below.
The animation program is generously supported by the Herman & Faye Sarkowsky Foundation and Cathy Sarkowsky through Northwest Film Forum.
