It’s the first weekend of 2014 patrol camps so we will see Lions on Friday night and Stags on Saturday night.  And just LOOK at that weather:

This Streetlam weather forecast is generated by the Met Office Weather Widget

Tonight, in the style of the late great Ray Harryhausen, the scouts will be doing some animation.  We’re hoping to produce a 30 second film for the RAC Road Safety Champions competition.

In the space of 90 minutes we need to brief the scouts, assign jobs, pick the stars of the show and complete all of the hand-drawn titles and credits.

To put some numbers on what we hope to achieve:

• An ordinary animation uses 24 individual images each second to create the moving pictures you see on TV and film.
• We need 30 seconds of film: that’s 720 individual images.
• We need to take those images with an ordinary camera in the space of about an hour.
• That means we need to click the shutter on the camera every 5 seconds for that hour to produce the film we need

Then there is the small matter of stitching it all together.  Once it is all done we will show it to the scouts on a troop night and submit it to the competition.  We will also put it on the Barton Scouts YouTube channel which is always full of things we have done.

If you want any more info on stop-motion animation, Wikipedia is always useful.