Great Source of Animated Movies

I've just been enjoying some great animated movies on the Aniboom.com site. The site is like a YouTube for aspiring animators. they can upload their videos and interact on the Aniboom communities. The site pushes the quality videos to the front page so it's quite easy to find the 'good stuff'.


These kinds of movies are great to use with students as they are short and engaging and a lot of the communicative message is covered by the visual aspect, so you can even exploit many of these videos with lower level language learners.

There's a section of the site called 'Produce' which has series of animated movies that have been created for the site, so you could use these to build up a series of lessons for your students.


I also really like the 'Create' section which has a couple of nice tools to get students creating their own short animated movies and gifs.

One is called 'Shapeshifter' and it's a free online software for creating 2D animation. There's a video tutorial here showing how it works: Shapeshifter tutorial



The other is called 'Micro-Smotion' and it allows students to create animations using their webcam. They can then post these to blogs, Facebook etc or email them to friends.

There are even some free basic lessons in animation on Animate 101

So lots to do on Aniboom and well worth a visit. As with any website, be sure to check anything you use with your students before letting them see it.

Hope you enjoy this site.

Related links:

• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Make you own animated movies
• Extending a Sentence
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences

Best

Nik Peachey