The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

Materials:
Pens and exercise books

---

64
The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
WORKSHEET: ANALYSING STORY STRUCTURE
Teachers’ note:
Ask your students to each choose a favourite animated fi lm and 
identify its theme, genre, main characters and storyline. These 
headings will allow you to begin to see what the story involves. 
When you compare the different lists you may well see lots of 
similarities.
FILM TITLE
THEME
GENRE
MAIN CHARACTERS AND THEIR TYPES
STORYLINE:
BEGINNING
(Establishing the confl ict)
MIDDLE
(Confl ict builds to black moment)
END
(Resolution)
Now ask the students to repeat the exercise for an original story 
they would like to write themselves.
Materials:
Exercise books, pens

---

Cineliteracy
65
WORKSHEET: STORYTELLING WITH A VIDEO CAMERA
Teachers’ note:
This exercise involves live action rather than animation. However, 
it is a wonderful warm-up activity to help students understand how 
to use a video camera and how to use basic fi lm language to tell a 
simple story. The skills can then be applied to any genre.
The exercise has also been tried successfully in English lessons, to 
help inspire observational creative writing.
One group of students enact an everyday scenario, for example, 
waiting for the bus while chatting about events of the day. They 
do not ‘act to camera’. It’s good to select an unstructured, ongoing 
situation in which the actors improvise.
Alternatively, choose another school activity as your subject, for 
example, a sporting event, a cookery class, etc.