Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

The NFB Animation Workshop
I only found out about this the other day while walking with Vanessa from the CBC Museum to Active Surplus that the NFB offered short workshops for kids Vanessa's age in animation. I know I would have loved the chance to do something like this when I was a kid, and despite Vanessa's nervousness about trying something new, I took both her and Annie to the workshop this morning. The workshops last about an hour-and-a-half and cost $5 per kid, which I thought was a bargain.

It all starts out with a screening in their private theatre of several of their animated shorts, all of them fun and demonstrating different animation techniques. Then we were escorted into a conference room and given a long narrow strip of paper with an animated spider shown in sequence, apparently lifted from the NFB short "The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly". The idea was to color it and then place it in a little kinescope so you could see how you could get an appearance of a moving image from a bunch of still images. Any nervousness Vanessa may have had vanished the moment she saw the paper and colouring markers, as this sort of stuff is right up her alley. Though she was too young by a year, the people there kindly let little Annie take part in this as well. She coloured the paper spider sequence in her own way, resulting it what can best be described as the "exploding spider" sequence. Vanessa's is more restrained in comparison. ;-) Both girls were really interested in the results, and Annie in particular loved spinning the kinescope with her creation in it round and round.

They apparently use different media in different classes – using such things as plastercine and scratching directly onto film – so we can head back for a different class sometime.

After the class we went to the main floor where we watched several NFB animation classics on their private viewing screens. We planted ourselves down in a two-seater (Annie kept roaming around) and using a touch-screen interface, called up cartoons to play on a bigger screen, the sound coming from two stereo directional speakers set into the seats we were in. A very comfortable and convenient way to call up movies – you could easily spend the better part of a day watching free films this way if you wanted to. ;-)