The first stage of the workshop is the story planning, in which children form groups and brainstorm together a story they would like to tell in their films, where and when this is set and what characters they are going to have in it. To do so they write down a simple script adding some storyboards to go with it if there is enough time.
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Following is the character designing stage, which is done individually by every child. Each child needs to decide the look of the puppet they're going to create from scratch. This is quite an exciting moment for their creativity, where they can bring out all of their inspirations from films or cartoon series they've seen or stories they read. Each child is meant to work on at least one character in the story.
The third stage is the character building, which is a crucial stage as the children get to apply on their very own character what they have learnt using all their creative skills. The character can be either two dimensional (if built with cards and put together with split pins) or three dimensional (if built with plasticine), as it shows in these two examples.
The fourth stage is the set designing, where children work together to create the look of the backgrounds for their films. This is also an important stage because a good set is quite essential in order to tell a good story. Also, backgrounds are strictly related to their characters, so children here have to take crucial decisions about the look of their films.
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Next is the setting up of the film work space, where children assemble together their sets and any props they made for it, and place their characters against the backgrounds/sets to get everything ready for action. They also need to set up their first scene on the animation software on the computer, and get the webcam ready for shooting.
Last is the shooting stage, where the film is finally being made by means of animating the characters frame by frame using the animation techniques called "stop motion", in which the animator moves their character ever so slightly in each frame before capturing the next picture with the camera. All the pictures taken are stored into the animation software as a sequence on its timeline, and when the sequence is played back it creates the so called "Illusion of life", where we see the character moving and the magic happens!