Kell Bank CE Primary School, Masham, Ripon

In the Summer term 2009 we were lucky to have the opportunity to work with Mr David Bunting a professional animator. We were given the brief to make a short animated film based on an event or story from the local community. We decided to use the story of the Leeds Pals as our inspiration because they trained in Colsterdale before going to fight in France in WW1.

We used books and the internet to find out lots of information about the pals including where they signed up, activities they did whilst at Breary Banks and also what it was like for them in the trenches. Then we used our literacy session to turn the story into a narrative poem.
We all chose lines from the poem to act as a story board and set to work drawing possible scenes for the animation.

Everything had to be made from the paved streets of Leeds to the water running under Masham Bridge. We were lucky to have lots of help from parents and local artist Mr Simon Palmer.

The lottery funding gave us use of a laptop with the software for the animation and a camera for taking the photos.

For each part of the story board we had to set up the scene with the backdrop and characters. When we were ready the computer operator would take a picture. They would then shout 'animate'. The animator would move the characters in the picture slightly. Once they were in position they would say 'Shoot' and computer operator would take another photo. This was repeated over and over again for every scene of the film. We had to take 8 photos for every second of filming!

At last, three weeks after writing our poem we premiered the finished film to a packed house at the Village Hall.

But the story did not end there. In October Mr Bunting informed us that the 'Leeds Pals' had been shortlisted for a prize at the Bristol Fresh Flics Film Festival. A group of year 5/6 pupils travelled to the festival along with staff, a parent and a governor to see our film shown on the big screen. It was a fantastic experience which was made even better when we heard that we had won best animated film in the Emerging Talent category.

This year we have heard that 'Leeds Pals' is being shown to audiences in India and Egypt.