Layered Spooky Animation

I've been playing with ideas for layered animations using the DoInk Animation iPad app. One idea is to split up the natural layers in a photo and add animated layers in between. I used a spooky house photo and began by importing it into a drawing app where I could color, blend, and mask out the tree in the foreground. Then I imported the original photo into Superimpose app to isolate it and save it as a png with a transparent background. See how here.

Original spooky photo

Masked out tree

isolated the tree

When I'm ready to animate I begin a new composition in DoInk and bring in my layers. I began with the masked out layer of the house, added a moon, animated bat, a semi-transparent ghost, and the isolated tree. I set the length of everything to six seconds and began making animation paths. Beyond teaching animation, this lesson would allow students to demonstrate overlapping, transparency, relative size, changes in size to show depth, as well as elements of storytelling. I exported the video and added music in a video editing app (see below). This would be a great way for students to tell their favorite spooky stories.

This idea is a completely drawn animation. Students would need to prepare each layer of the composition as separate drawings in the DoInk app first. Below are the layers I drew. Some are stagnant: cloud, tree, and the sky/moon. Some have "flip book" styled animation where I change something to make the drawing move. This is found in the ghost, bat, and the flashing eyes of the house.

Some of the elements didn't need to be drawn with movement since the path I create in the composition has movement. I layered all the elements together in this 4 sec. animation. This project also gives students a chance to demonstrate foreground, middle ground, background, overlapping, transparency, movement, relative size, and storytelling. I set it to music in a video app below. These would make one interesting spooky class movie when set to music.

Learn about MultiPlane Animation

What we are doing in Do Ink animation app is similar to what Walt Disney and his crew invented to make their feature length animations more realistic. Learn about it here:

Related ideas:

See this post about 2nd graders' Really Spooky Landscapes where they digitally animated over their spooky landscape painting then entered their scene with the Green Screen app by DoInk.
See this post for resources to teach the lesson.

Here is another version of a spooky layered animation. This time I made a painting in the museum haunted with a semi-transparent ghost flying between the layers. The animation (made in DoInk Animation app) was loaded behind an empty picture frame using the DoInk green app.