The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

Leonardo da Vinci:
his drawings of moving fi gures
Raphael:
his drawings of moving fi gures
Edgar Degas:
his paintings of ballet dancers

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Getting Started
31
Joanna Quinn:
her animated men and women in the short fi lms 
Girls Night Out
and 
Body Beautiful
Mario Minichiello:
narrative drawings
Gerald Scarfe:
narrative drawings
Preston Blair’s 
guidebooks to character design and animation
Materials:
Pencils, A4 or A5 photocopy paper or sketchpads
Resources:
Handout: Drawing Simple Transformations:
Short videos about drawing: 
http://www.andysanimation.co.uk/Pages/DrawingVideos.html
An online drawing course:
http://www.karmatoons.com/drawing/drawing.htm
A page of links to drawing resources:
http://www.artshow.com/resources/drawing.html
A video showing how to draw mad scientist and 
Frankenstein character designs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R5izhTr7ko&feature=related

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Cineliteracy is the understanding and appreciation of fi lm or 
‘moving image texts’. It is the development of skills in reading, 
comprehending and judging moving images and sound both 
intellectually and emotionally. Understanding animation as one type 
of moving image text is referred to as animation literacy. This toolkit 
aims to refl ect the role animation has in students’ lives and to offer 
some suggestions on how this interest can be used to build on an 
understanding of animation literacy.
Through animation we can explore a wide range of social, cultural 
and personal issues. Animation projects can be readily integrated 
into any curriculum subject. Why not develop a maths and animation 
project for example? Animation can involve and illustrate complex 
ideas, relevant to any study area.
Like any cultural product, animation can be considered historically, 
economically, aesthetically, technologically and in terms of a 
given production context. All of these approaches have a place in 
cineliteracy.
An understanding of cineliteracy is a key part of the media 
component of the English National Curriculum. The Focus of 
Learning charts on pp. 34–35 are based on the English National 
Curriculum guidelines for Key Stage 3 and 4 (ages 11–16).
The three themes of cineliteracy are:
Film Language
Producers and Audiences
Messages and Values