The Choice to Animate

From the conception of my project I made the decision to include some small animations on my powerpoints. This was to ensure that I kept the attention of my audience without distracting too much from the content. The most important animations that i intend to create are on the presentation for Key Stage 2, on my dinosaur characters. I think this will add a real sense of fun that is required when talking to younger children. For most of the dinosaur characters, the animatinos I chose are fairly obvious. These choices were inlfuenced by my industry panel's suggestion that I have my charcters interacting more with the content on my slides. However, I did struggle with deciding on an animation for the introductory slide with the red Triceratops. As the slide involved a lot of questions, I wanted to have an aspect of confusion or curiosity about the animation for the character. I decided to produce 3 mockups of different animations to decide which looked best in practise. At this point I was also around a family member who works with children and asked for advice to get feedback on what would be more effective considering the young audience. You can see the 3 animation options I created below.

As for the animations for the Key Stage 3 presentaion, I decided to go for an even more simplistic animation, as this age group are more able to concentrate on presentations, and more likely to be interested by and interact with the content without requiring an attention grabbing tool. Instead, my plan for the robot character animations is to include a "Telly Tubby" style screen on his chest. Here, I plan to have an image that flickers onto the screen which will change for each new slide. I also may decide to add a small amount of screen flickering and pixelation to keep a level of personality and intrigue. 

For the same reason I chose more simplistic animations for the Key Stage 3, I decided to not include animations at all for the Key Stage 4 presentation as, drawing from my own memories of that age, I believe the 15/16 year old students would be put off and feel patronised by the inclusion of animated characters.