Chaper 11: Prepare

What we did: Sarah, Jess and I decided to get together and discuss our project ideas. During this entire module, we have always favoured the idea of investigating the space module. 


The  Welsh Science Framework for KS2 outlines that students should investigate Space and the Solar System. From this we deduced a creative idea about establish a new mnemonic for remembering the planets names and order because it has been established that Pluto is no longer a planet, so we needed a new one to learn for ourselves also. It was for these reasons that we decided that the Solar System would be an interesting topic for us to use in our Stop-Motion feature. 

Preparation is key for any animation project. Jess and I discussed possible drawings, and characters to use in the animation. Originally, there were going to be animated characters, but we decided as a team it would be more time efficient to just start the video from me introducing the sun. Here are some sketches of possible characters we were going to use:





I also did a quick story board of a plan to start the animation. However, we decided to just use people instead of drawings due to time and lack of equipment.


One of the hardest challenges we faced was deciding the appropriate mnemonic that we were going to use for our animation. We decided on My Very Energetic Monkey Just Swings Until Needed. We decided to use this because our target audience were young children at key stage 1 and it was also easy to animate.


All the planets were printed from small to large, for a zoom effect within the video. We also included the sun because it is the centre of our solar system. We decided to laminate the letters, planets and words for our animation.