Think back to your school days. Do you remember children playing with ‘flip books’ and creating their own? The fascination of playing with lenticular pictures? (Yes – they really do have an official name!) Picking up a puppet to create a character and tell a story? Giving a leaf a life? Children are fascinated by visual images and, if they move AND the children can control that movement, even better.
The moving image is a natural part of the human psyche. We use it to think and imagine. When we read we recreate the ‘world’ within the book in our own ‘motion picture’. Have you ever met someone who thinks in ‘stills’?
Still from ‘Trip to the Moon’
There is a complete history of moving images from Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope to the films and television presentations that have fascinated us all for years and within that myriad of moving images the ‘impossible’ ones are the ones that we retain the most – from the rocket in the moon’s eye from Georges Méliès’s ‘Trip to the Moon’, Disney’s hand drawn cells of the witch in ‘Snow White’, Aardman Animation’s plasticine Wallace and Gromit to Pixar’s Buzz and Woody following the moving truck to Andy’s new house. Animations are an advertiser’s dream because of this. Even the adverts are becoming iconic – Wondering what a certain well known department store is going to show this Christmas?
Animation can portray a message, clarify understanding of a story (even Shakespeare!), retell a story, recreate an event, bring history alive, put forward an opinion, interpret music, art and/or poetry, complete a song, enhance a parent assembly, be part of a school play, demonstrate scientific understanding, clarify maths, bring another dimension to artwork, enable children to teach others… the list is endless.
So the real question should be: ‘Why not use animation?’ If you are still unsure how animation can help you or you have a barrier which is stopping you then CONTACT US. If you are ready to ‘talk animation’ then CONTACT US!