Make you own animated movies

D- film is a really useful website that has been around for a few years now. The site makes it very easy to create short animated movies with colourful characters and cartoon style dialogue in bubbles. (Be careful though, some of the characters may be unsuitable for younger learners less mature students.)

The site is really easy to use and you just click your way through various screens selecting backgrounds, characters, scenarios, soundtrack and credits. You also type in your own short dialogues. Then when you are ready a single click turns the whole thing into a Flash movie.

You can make short single screen animated movies or longer ones by adding more scenes. You can then email the link to your movie either to yourself or to your students etc.

How do I create movies?

• If you watch this tutorial you can see just how easy it is to make a film.
  Tutorial movie (458k flash)
• Here’s an example of a film that took about 2 minutes to produce.
  Example movie
• This link takes you straight to the movie maker page.
  Movie maker
  

How do you use this in the classroom?
You can use it for a number of things:

• To demonstrate language points
  Example movie
  
• To give examples of social English
  Example movie
  
• To tell jokes
  Example movie
  
• I once got my students to create their own movies based around concepts (fear, happiness, boredom, etc) and we had our own miniature animation festival.
  
• You could try setting up a competition in the school to see who can create the best film.

If you think of any great ways of using this little tool or you or your students create some nice films, by all means add a link to them in the comments below.