I have decided to take up a project I had intended to do over the Christmas Break, but had to abandon. I wanted to make a pixel animation of the Bandura Bobo doll experiments that might be fun to include in our presentations in psychology. I plan to use Pixelorama, which is a free pixel-animation software that I have used before. The version I am using is v1.05-stable.
Previously, I have used this in my classes when I taught middle school students in Gwangju, Korea. Here are some examples:
This is a .gif I used to illustrate what a character might be thinking. I was teaching from the Rocket Girl series, in which the main character is a superheroine who conceals her identity from her friends. She excuses herself to the toilet to change into her costume, but leaves the school. One of her friends remarks on her long absence, thus this sprite.
I like to start characters by making a rotating T-pose. This gives me multiple perspectives of the character, which are fairly easy to modify. The Rocket Girl characters all started as spinning T-pose characters.
I then modified them for my classes. The .gif below was created for an icebreaker exercise. When teaching students for whom English is an L2, I find it is better to show them what to do with a minimum of text.
This one started as an illustration for the idiom, “When the shit hits the fan,” but I extended it and used it as a slide to introduce when we were to play a game.
For my Bandura .gifs, I am going to make the sprites of higher resolution. I also want to have a more 3D feel, with action happening in depth. So far, I have made a sprite for the Bobo doll. It only spins currently, but I am quite pleased with its resemblance to the original and the smoothness of its movement. The shadow, which is on a separate layer in the original file, is a little dark and not quite in line with what I have in mind, but I shall leave it for now.
