Children tell how they “made cartoons”!

From that experience, Ospitaletto (Brescia, Italy, 1996) it came the wonderful drawing of the mouse, that I have used a lot of times during years. Another great image is the one about “copying” voices with the cassette recorder!

I've always been trying to look at true children facing personal media, and now, as recovering old documents and listening again after so much time to those real voices, though 15 years “old”, I think that they are worth to be spread around, to be published.

The video is taken from an original VHS, and 5 years old babies tell how they made “cartoons”, just clicking on “small pictures” on the screen, making images and sounds to come and go from the screen. There are many transitions and titles, and only a few real animations in this video (the main aim was to write a book, as actually we did, printed). Though, this is maybe enough to evoke another possible story, of children making multimedia with a professional software (Scala MM 400 in this case) as well as trying easy and very powerful animations with the unreachable anim-brushes of the old Amiga (out of the experience of most Microsoft and Apple users!)

Actually, kindergarten children couldn't manage alone a professional software like Scala, but they could deal very well with graphic objects and their position on the pages, with the in and out effects and transitions. And naturally, create astonishing animations in few seconds just dragging the mouse across the screen (little but better examples are in Ulisse, Con il Topolino..., Ciak si gira.

In order to see kids working without an adult guide, in my experience they are to be at least in the 4^th grade of primary school. I first tested it in a perfect workshop situation, year 2000, with Scala Infochannel Designer on Windows (without anim-brushes, of course!), with a whole group of nine years old working quiet alone, after a 15 minutes introduction.

But their true voices... this is what generally, speaking about children, we have not the occasion of listening to.