Animation Jam had regular sessions spread over a school year with wonderful groups of pupils at Fairview School, a school for pupils with complex needs. This project was funded by Creative Scotland’s ‘Screen Education Fund’ and lasted from September 2024 to June 2025. Weekly sessions supported a small group, mentoring them through different kinds of animation designed to suit their abilities.
The final film is a collection of shorts made by individual pupils of groups. Some are experiments to help learn techniques, some are longer developed films.
A ‘Making of’ documentary was also made as part of the funded project. This film is really exciting and shows the process of developing artwork, story and animation over a whole school year.
How were these films made?
We started with ‘taster session’ for all the high school pupils, giving them the choice to continue for the rest of the year. 7 pupils had around 30x 1hr sessions. The project was successful in many ways.
The biggest successes were:
Patience and an ability to work on a single idea for a long period of time.
Peer reviewing each other’s animated films. Regular screenings of the groups work was always watched with joy and laughter. A session near the end of the project focussed on pupils opinions of each other’s films, with comments gathered being put towards applications for a Dynamic Youth Award, from Youth Scotland.
Developing an understanding of movement of characters or objects by repeating short exercises. Pupils were willing and able to do this unaided for periods.
Recreating animation that's similar to the films they love. Pupils were able to use their favourite characters and control the action with a new found understanding of visual effects and audio production.
Staff engagement was fantastic and the regular staff built up confidence in supporting the pupils with animating over time. Two of the teachers have already done some extra animation with pupils away from our group and feel confident they could do it again.
Animation Jam worked in partnership with Fairview school, with class teachers and learning assistants gaining enough skills over the year to be able to do animation with pupils without my support. The project has left a great legacy, with staff not only keen to do more, but technically capable with their own equipment and materials.
As with many of Animation Jam projects, the process of making it is just as, if not more important than the final animations. Here’s a selection of some of the activities involved.
