As a Transforming Archives Trainee with the National Archives, I have been working at Archives Plus for the last 8 months. During this time I have been putting my background in IT and working in schools to good use! Working with my very supportive colleagues here at Archives+ we have been busy using tech such as a Green Screen and Augmented Reality to bring our archive collections alive to families joining us at our Saturday Spectacular events.
Using the green screen at Christmas and for Chinese New Year and Augmented Reality at our Spooky Saturday event.
At our last Saturday Spectacular we introduced our new stop-motion animation workshops to our visitors. They LOVED it! Families and friends worked together to create short animation clips using archive images for inspiration and as backgrounds. The clips will be used to create an interactive book for visitors to read whilst sat on our Bookbench over summer.
How do we do it? First we selected the archive images that would inspire our animators to create movie clips about Manchester. Our visitors decided on what characters they would like to use and they set about drawing, creating and working with illustrator, Caroline Coates, to get them ready. After a quick tutorial on using the app ‘Animate It’ they were ready to go.
Using very small movements and a lot of imagination our animators created some fantastic movie clips. We will be holding more workshops over the summer holidays to add narrations, sound effects and music to the clips ready to share on our interactive book.
Here is a taster of a few of the clips. If you would like to join one of our Summer Holiday Workshops just drop in 2-4pm on 1, 8, 15 or 22 August. Look out for the Manchester bee…
Visit our events page for information of upcoming activities, talks and more – click here
