Welcome to Gorseville

Stuart Gorse from Lancaster Royal Grammar School has been exploring his creative side again by inventing and animating his very own little town made out of figures and accessories from The Early Learning Centre. Following in the footsteps of Hugo, Stuart's Web 2.0 podcasting and vodcasting ventriloquist dummy, Gorseville is also designed to catch the imagination of his pupils and help them to revise for their French GCSE exams.

So far, Stuart has produced a number of one stop animation clips including Gorseville, Où est la gare, Gorseville: le marché, Le boulanger, Au camping and Le défilé de mode. He plans to shoot further videos covering other transactional scenarios such as 'at the bakery' and 'asking directions'.

As Stuart/Pierre explained in his recent post Un touriste anglais arrive à Gorseville on the TES Staffroom for Modern Languages, he uses a standard digital video camera to take a still picture of the scene and then adjusts the position of each character slightly to form a defined sequence of movement. That done, he imports the set of images into MovieMaker and synchronises the footage with suitable sound effects and audio he has recorded with his high achieving pupils. When finished, Stuart then renders the animation and uploads it to a video hosting service such as YouTube.

Like marmot.morveux, I think this is an inspirational idea and I hope Stuart can find the time to show us more instalments of Gorseville in the coming months. I'm definitely adding these to my VodPod!

Comments

[IC Jones]

Thank you for the explanation, Joe. I loved the clips too and I wondered how it was done... However, I did try to put those wonderful clips on my vodpod and could not do it. I thought something had been disabled to prevent embedding but you have obviously managed to do it as one of them is embedded at the start of your post.What am I getting wrong?
Isabelle
http://isabellejones.blogspot.com

[Joe Dale]

Hi Isabelle.

You're right. When I wrote this I hadn't actually tested whether I could in fact embed the clip. As you know you can for the Gorseville one, but Stuart has disabled the rest.

[Mr Gorse]

I think I have enabled the rest, haven't I?