My boys’ robot movie
Created 30 July 2003
I’m so proud of my boys. I’ve always tried to encourage their creative sides, and they haven’t let me down. My five-year-old is an obsessive sketcher (as I have mentioned before). My eleven-year-old is fascinated by media of all sorts, and has a knack for working computers.
So my fiver drew one of his typical pictures, filled with complex robots and (inexplicably) an elevator in which are riding me, him, and my niece. I just recently bought my elevener a used copy of Flash 5 on eBay, which he has learned with astonishing ease (“No, Dad, you need a keyframe there. Click the frame after that one, then select Insert - Keyframe, ...”!!!). At my suggestion, the drawing was scanned and animated.
The older did an admirable job injecting motion into the drawing, and the younger coached him about his original intent, where it was not clear in the drawing (“No, that’s an eye that goes back and forth! Make the gears go around!”).
The original drawing:
![The original drawing](http://nedbatchelder.com/pix/boysrobots_drawing.png)
The finished movie:
![The robot animation](http://nedbatchelder.com/pix/boysrobots.gif)
I’ll say it again: I’m so proud of my boys.
See also
- My blog, where other similar topics are occasionally discussed.
Comments
Thanks for the inspiration.
Your son's drawing remind me of my own "robot" drawings when I was a kid. I also liked to draw robots in caves, with elevator shafts and I typically drew the flashing top on them as well. My robots did a lot of excavating and mining.
My son is only two now, it'll be a few years before he's drawing robots (or whatever it is he'll be drawing). Our kids are so fortunate to have so many tools and toys available to them!
Thanks for posting the drawings, tell your kids they're inspiring people around the world.
Kudos to your sons!
And here comes their constructive criticism. Try using solid colors instead of radials for coloring!
They might be interested on learning how to keyframe animate as well, a la Disney.
Ah Ruku - constructive criticism requires an output to be constructive. Like Why use solids? This is a good example of constructive criticsm.
I suspect unconstructive criticism is the partial cause of my mature students loosing contact with their imagination.
"imagination is more important than knowledge" Einstien
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