Curtis Jobling on I CAN ANIMATE

Kudlian Soft are please to welcome Curtis Jobling as the patron of Animate IT '08.

"I was first made aware of the I Can Animate programme when I was hosting a series of animation workshops with a primary school in the North East of England.

The children who took part in the class had little knowledge of film and certainly no experience in animation.

To see how quickly they took to the task with the help of the I Can Animate software was quite simply breathtaking.

Here was a group of children who knew nothing about animation who within one day had made their own short animated films.

The programme is so user, friendly and aesthetically pleasing to work with that even a bona-fide technophobe like Jobling here was able to pick it up!

The great thing about animation is that it's a medium that children can get their first taste of movie making in. When you make your own animated short film, effectively you get to play "God", creating a whole world from either scratch or things around you.


• YOU get to decide what happens in that world.
• YOU get to create the characters.
• YOU get to supply the voices and sound effects.
• Plus you don't have primping, preening, prima donna actor types to worry about!

I Can Animate and most early animation projects lend themselves readily to claymation - there can be very few children in the UK who haven't built models from plasticene at some point in their early years.

By using this as the starting point the whole task of making a film is less intimidating to youngsters, using something they have a familiarity with. It's recognised that not all children have the same level of skills with a pencil in their hand, but literally anybody can attempt animation with claymation. To master claymation well, that's another lesson entirely!"

Curtis Jobling