I finally decided to share my history with teaching animation in Estonia. It has been a while now since I left that career (2023), so looking back I think I can see things more clearly on certain aspects.

The following posts will have some insights on what it was like.

Here is a pic from the 2022 Summer camp where we had the city kids/teens all in one group. It was meant to be aimed at Ukrainian refugee kids as the funding was based around this premise, to help these kids learn some new things, but there only ended up being 2 of such kids while the rest were all local.

Very few of these kids knew about animation, so I think their parents just saw this easy way to get some peace and quiet no matter what camp their kids go to.

Some girls , the older ones, were pretty sneaky in drawing on the light tables’ (the boards with that giant plastic circle, that has light from underneath to make the paper more see-through) surface, so vandalizing the property with their furry art. This made the organizer of the camp really mad, so she forced the girls to stay after the class to wipe the lightboxes clean. The girls were good kids otherwise, and because we had a few arguments on the furry art subject, they gave me a cute gift after the camp was over. I need to find that art they made and the marzipan bag. I took a pic of it but it was a while ago.

The camp was also part outside, so when kids were learning pixilation, or body stop motion, where you take a pic of each movement, and then it becomes like puppet animation, that feeling of awkward movement that skips the rest of live-action frames, so it becomes almost a slow motion type effect.

My focus was of course on hand-drawn animation, so we used the classic pencil and paper approach to learn the very basics. I could tell right away which kids had patience to complete even the simplest of tasks, and not surprising that younger ones cared very little on what they created, as animation is over saturated today. The magic is hard to appreciate when the kids all had smartphones from like age 5 (terrible parenting). Though I was glad the 2 teen siblings, who were older ones in that group, did show a lot of interest and care in what they did. My Estonian was pretty rusty (after not being around Estonians for years, as I was usually with expats or the Russian speaking kids in school where I taught), but their English was decent enough for our communication to go smoothly. It was a fun experience overall, despite the younger kids not really caring or understanding why they are in that camp in the first place.