Pixton again

I had a great time last week with my Upper Sixth playing with Pixton. We're studying two films of Truffaut for A2 and as we are homing in on character work at the moment, I thought it would be fun for them to write their own extra scene for the film and set up a heart-to-heart between a couple of characters, using the Pixton cartoon site as a medium. Despite taking a while to get to grips with it (not for the colour-blind: in advanced cartoon creation everything depends on whether the editing box over your character is blue, red or green...) they really enjoyed the creativity of the activity. Within half an hour they had found imaginitive ways of expressing the character's views and feelings in words and by using the highly-customisable posture and expression options Pixton provides. The bonus was that the students are beginning to understand, hands-on, what sorts of decisions a director has to make, frame by frame ("shall I zoom on the character or will I miss out on the other character's reaction?"etc.). The corrected, printed versions are going to make an eye-catching start to our Truffaut character wall.

PS Links are playing up for me again tonight, so with apologies, the one vital address here: www.pixton.com

As I previously suspected, Pixton is maybe a little too complex and less visually appealing than other sites, such as toondoo, for younger students, but is a fantastic tool for the more ambitious or experienced. I'm now wondering about setting a cartooning task for November's "blogechange" project...

Pixton Advanced Cartoon Creation

Loony Toons

I've been looking at a few different cartoon-making websites with a view to encouraging students to write creatively in French. Pixton is a sophisticated site which can enable you to produce convincing-looking satirical-style cartoons. Looks good for more advanced students, as it is flexible but maybe less visually-attractive than some others. Makebeliefscomix is good as a beginners' site, as it gives simple on-screen instructions and isn't cluttered with complicated features. No registration is needed, so quick to set up a task with students, but they will need to print their strip as the site does not store cartoons. Comiqs is fun and flexible, as you can use your own photos, so could be really motivating, but you need to be careful about permission to use photos. I like the idea of getting students to work on some exchange photos on their return from a trip (or indeed while you are there if they are in a school and have access to computers). My personal favourite, however, is toondoo, as it provides a really wide variety of characters (including aliens and monsters) and props which can really spark off the imagination and elicit some really interesting language. You can see an example of a toondoo cartoon here and a pixton strip in the post above.

Child's play:click on the cartoon to scroll across