The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

The Airship Hindenburg
We have included this fi lm on the companion website as an example 
of a model of working you might wish to support at your school. The 
Airship Hindenburg was made by 12- to 16-year-olds in Schome 
Park, a secure island within Teen Second Life. Residents of Schome 
Park each have an ‘avatar’, a 3D representation of themselves which 
can then interact with others, and the world they inhabit. Second 
Life has a highly sophisticated software interface, allowing users 
enormous creative freedom to build the 3D world around them, as 
well as live within it. This also interfaces with the tools needed to fi lm 
events in world, which makes it ideal for machinima production.
Materials and software:
Students will need to fi rst master the Second Life viewer (software 
interface), which is a free download for PCs or Macs. Extensive 
3.6 MACHINIMA

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The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
tutorials are available on the website. They will then need a plug-in 
to capture in world activity as avi video fi les. The best PC tool is 
Auto Screen Recorder 3 (approx. £50 per licence). A cheaper PC 
option is Fraps (approx. £20 per licence). Macintosh users can use 
Snapz Pro X (approx. £35). Please check the internet for latest 
versions and prices.
When they have captured their avi or mov fi les, they can import 
them into an editing software package. It is advisable to capture 
the fi les at the highest resolution the computer will allow, then 
downsample them to standard video fi les if necessary.
The fi nished edit can then be published on the internet. An excellent 
free software package to encode video fi les for the web is Super 
C. For fi les which can also be streamed in Second Life, use these 
settings: Output fi le: mov Video Codec: H.264/AAC Video Size: 853 
x 480 pixels. Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Frames per Sec: 25 Video Bitrate: 
768 kb per sec Audio Channels: 2 Audio Bitrate: 128 kb per sec. 
Pixel Aspect 1:1 For web publishing use mp4 rather than mov as 
your output fi le, for better image quality at this compression.
Resources:
Video: The Airship Hindenburg: 
View of a machinima set

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Animation Styles