My friend, the very talented Ivan Olea, is an animator and animation teacher. He has been talking with me about animating my characters for a while, and we finally together to start playing around with them this week. And it was so much fun!

Ivan is doing stop motion animation with kids in his animation classes and wanted to turn my characters into ‘puppets’ with moveable objects for the kids to play with animating.

The first step was to look at which characters we wanted to bring together into a scene, and what scale each character would need to be, relative to each element.

The next step was to then pull the characters apart and break them into their elements.

Once we had worked this out, I drew the individual elements up large and at the right scale for creating the scene, then cut each element out so that we could pin them together. This then created puppets with moveable elements that could be animated.

The final step was to put them into the camera frame and capture a series of frames with the characters in motion!

Next I’ll be painting backgrounds that we can pan across, and creating storylines for the character scene.

Ivan runs a fantastic after-school animation class for kids at Creative Corner Studio in Dulwich Hill – if you have creative kids, make sure you book them in for this fun term-long program!