When chairs shrink...

At St Peter's today I worked with some of the pupils to develop the visual elements (backgrounds, characters and props) of our animatic while Hayley worked with the others to develop and record dialogue.
This was my third attempt to produce an animatic with pupils via a 'rostrum camera puppet show' approach, whereby characters are moved around a background on a table in real time, and filmed with a camera over-head. What I have learned improves the process each time but another big factor is skill and supervision ratios. Last time it was just me with two teachers, two TAs and two classes. This time it was Hayley and I with one teacher, one TA, one parent helper and one class. This much more manageable situation meant that the pupils were able to turn the production round in a day, overcoming communication, group working and technical problems to do so.

The chairs in the title were a part of the session picked out by Jane, the class teacher, as being particularly interesting. I asked pupil X to stand at a distance from the others and then asked them close one eye and frame pupil X's head between their fingers. They then moved this measured distance down the body to prove the 'five heads' rule of figure drawing (It turns out that the rule is actually eight heads, but five seemed to work for us! Probably explained by the facts that children's heads are proportionately larger than adult heads and that when you're looking down at someone the body and legs are somewhat foreshortened).
http://www.realcolorwheel.com/human.htm
I then asked them to frame a nearby chair and a more distant chair to prove that objects appear smaller as they move further away. I also demonstrated this by drawing a little girl the same height at different points on a background scene. She went from appearing to be a normal height in the foreground, to being nearly as tall as the castle in the background, to being a giant on the horizon!