The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

Camera/director team’s task:
Tell a story on camera about what you see. Limit your choices to the 
visual realm, rather than attempting to record specifi c conversations. 
You won’t be editing the fi lm, so shoot in the order you want to view 
the fi nished sequence.
Hints and tips:
Consider using close-ups and medium static shots to isolate 
important details. Consider which details to choose and why. If you 
decide to use zooms, pans or tilts, how do they shift focus for the 
audience? What is their dramatic intent? What do they tell us about 
the subject that a static shot can’t?
Consider establishing the situation with one or more wide shots. 
How does each shot help to unfold the story? How might you keep 
your audience interested by mixing different camera angles and shot 
types?
Think about the information you wish to include and what can be 
ignored.

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The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
Review the footage:
In discussing the end result, ask these questions:
Has your sequence combined to tell a coherent story?
How might an audience interpret what they see?
Have you applied bias through your shot selection process?
If so, what point of view have you articulated?
Materials:
Data projector, whiteboard or screen and sound (to review the 
video), video camera and tape

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WORKSHEET: SCRIPT WRITING FOR ANIMATION
Teachers’ note:
The script is where everything starts. It’s a roadmap, a plan, a guide, 
a source to be inspired by. Typically, before anything else happens 
in producing a fi lm project of any scale an idea is written down, fi rst 
as a brief outline or treatment, then as a more detailed breakdown of 
the story and fi nally as a script which everybody works from.
A script is a key document involved in the creation of any fi lm. A 
good script should describe action with just enough detail, but 
not too much, to inspire amazing images. A script will give you 
an idea of structure, character, action and tone. The script can be 
supplemented by your storyboard.
Don’t write camera movements or compositions into the script, just 
use it for story structure, dialogue, action and events. (Compositions 
can be better described in the storyboard.)
In most cases there will be a sense of a beginning, middle and an 
end. Establish a situation, complicate it, resolve it. Invite us into your 
world and make us curious about what is going to happen. Send us, 
the viewers on a journey we did not expect to go on. Shake us up 
with a ‘black’ moment, just before it all ends with a solution.
Remember that animation can subvert and amplify reality.
Some students fi nd that writing their ideas in script form comes 
easily to them. Some prefer to think in drawings and storyboards, 
others are equally comfortable doing both. There is no one right way 
to develop a story idea. Most animation productions are the result 
of teamwork, so a key task is to delegate roles according to each 
member’s particular talents.
A popular approach is to begin with a text-only script, then develop 
the storyboard from that, adding the appropriate lines of script under 
each storyboard frame.
An effective script-writing exercise is to give each student a short 
story of one to three paragraphs. Ask the students to adapt the 

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The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
story into a script, adopting the same format as the example in the 
Headless Smuggler handout.
The source of the original story is included in the