Classical Outreach: The Panoply Vase Animation Project
by Dr Sonya Nevin
Outreach has never been so highly prioritised within Higher Education. Classical Studies has benefitted enormously from the increasingly diverse voices that are heard within the discipline, something which effective outreach encourages and supports. The Panoply Vase Animation Project is an outreach project that was set-up as a way of enlivening ancient Greek artefacts to help young people and non-specialist adults to enjoy and engage with classical culture. We work with real artefacts in order to keep the focus on classical material, and the original artwork provides the lead for the action. As a classicist, I provide the knowledge of antiquity and teaching that informs the animations and their supporting materials. Steve K Simons is the animator who brings the artefacts to life. The animations are available online for use in the classroom or leisure viewing and they can also be seen in a number of museums alongside the vases they were made from and those made in a similar style.
The animations have enriched my experience of outreach work. In addition to using still images of vases to illustrate the various subjects I might be talking about — typically Greek warfare, religion, or athletics — I now supplement those images with vase animations. The animations can be selected by topic on the project website (www.panoply.org.uk) in order to make it easy for teachers and lecturers to identify which animations are relevant for the topics they are teaching. For example, our most recent animation is The Symposium, made from a black-figure kylix with a symposium scene in the interior. The Symposium was made for Classics in Communities, a University of Oxford Classics Faculty outreach project, and it acts out the activities implied in the original scene, with figures eating grapes, having their cups filled by a server, drinking and sharing cups, playing music and — an addition to the original scene — a game of kottabos. As such, the animation works well as a lively demonstration of symposium culture whether the focus is symposiums themselves, or further topics such as the performative aspects of Greek poetry, the sympotic setting of philosophy, or the dynamics of citizenship and gender. The animations are intended for use alongside still images, discussions, and visits to see real vases, and by realising the suggestion of movement in the artefacts they increase the dynamism of the scenes to catch people’s interest and imagination and to draw them into the material. Watching the animations feels like a fun and informal activity which creates a positive frame of mind for learning. The animations also help with interpretation and comprehension. During The Symposium, the symposiasts sit up or lean back on their cushions to share a cup, pick grapes, and to take down a lyre. The presence of the cushions is clearer once you see people using them. The lyre is more noticeable and more easily comprehended once someone begins to tune it. The animation of these sorts of details helps viewers to connect with them and to begin looking for suggestions of movement and meaning in other vases too.
The animations have proved popular with a diverse range of viewers. The majority of people watching them for leisure online are adults, and that’s adults in all quarters of the world. Within the classroom I have included them in undergraduate teaching to illustrate topics and to add to discussions about interpretation, and other academics have reported positive experiences of taking a similar approach. They have also proved popular with primary aged classes (Key Stage 1 and 2 in the UK, ages 5–11) and older school-pupils. The young ones are at an age when movement added to still images is particularly striking. Teachers have sent us some delightful artwork that their pupils have done in response to vases and the animations. I have taught a number of successful sessions with this age-group, with the animations acting as a lively introduction to talking about the Greeks and how vases can help us to know about them. In these classes I would tend to keep to the lighter animations, such as Clash of the Dicers and Hermes’ Favour. The animations are particularly effective amongst secondary school classes (KS 3–5, ages 11–18), and teachers working with this age group are the ones who write to us most often. Any of the animations can be used with this age group, which essentially means that the serious-toned Hoplites! Greeks at War can be brought into the mix in a way that you might not with younger pupils. Pupils who have been studying Classics and Greek art for some time have responded very positively to the vase animations and so have those who are new to it. The Ure Discovery project, for example, involved pupils from a school with an art focus, who had never studied classics, learning about vases through museum and storyboarding sessions. Similarly we have heard of their use in art classes as part of an introduction to Greek art and thinking about creative responses to artefacts. The animations have also proved popular with pupils who are relatively disengaged from mainstream academic study. In 2014 I led ancient history classes for a gang prevention group at a charity in South London. These boys had not looked at ancient world topics before, but they were interested in the animations straightaway simply because they were animations. That led smoothly into discussions about ancient culture and how and where they could visit museums and see real artefacts. They seemed very pleased that someone thought that they might want to learn about ancient culture and threw themselves enthusiastically into the discussions and activities that followed. It is unlikely that any of them will go on to become classicists, but they had positive educational experiences (itself an excellent result) and finished with a clearer picture of antiquity and a greater sense of how to read and access art.
Creating the resources to support the animations has been a large part of their success. While teachers were keen to show them from the start, many told us that they liked them and would like to use them but were not sure what to do with them. To address this we developed the project website. As well as housing the animations, it includes information relating to their subjects. The Symposium, for example, comes with information about symposium culture, further vase images of symposiums, links to ancient literature in symposium settings, and suggested further reading. This provides information for any visitor and something that teachers can draw on when planning their classes — particularly if they are using the animations to illustrate topics. We also added suggested activities that can be done in relation to the animations. Prominent amongst these is help with storyboarding activities — either storyboarding different versions of the animations or storyboards based on alternative vases. We create activity sheets that support this storyboarding, including multiple choice questions to develop characters and stories based on the vases. Other sheets include activities such as designing shields and drawing gorgon faces — activities that can be done with static vases yet specifically compliment the animations. Providing information and activity suggestions is a great way to broaden outreach; teachers are busy and rarely have the time to think about ways to incorporate new materials unless they are essential, so helping them over that hurdle makes your classical material a practical choice as well as an attractive one. Having these materials easily available is also an effective way to reach into classrooms where time and distance might prevent you from personally appearing. Teachers in South America and Africa have written to us to say how much they have enjoyed using these materials with their classes and that is a reach I could never have achieved through school visits alone. To re-enforce the take-up of the animations and other materials I give presentations for teachers; this helps to make them aware of the materials that are available and to give them ideas about what they might do with them, and it is an opportunity for me to hear feedback and suggestions.
The animations have been a rewarding opportunity to collaborate with other professionals. Most of the animations include soundtracks by ancient music specialists such as Conrad Steinmann, Stefan Hegal, and Barnaby Brown. The Symposium features Barnaby playing on a replica of the Louvre aulos; the sound of ancient music creates an unusual atmosphere and for The Symposium it really adds to the viewer’s understanding of the aulos-player’s presence in the original scene. I also run a blog which includes interviews with academics talking about their use of vases in their research, such as Anastasia Bakogianni discussing Electra and Philip de Souza on ancient fleets. This gives non-specialists an opportunity to hear more about academic research and the tremendous range of insights that can be gained through vases.
Over the next five years we’ll be making animations and a documentary within an ERC-funded project called Our Mythical Childhood…The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges, led by Katarzyna Marciniak of the University of Warsaw. Three of those animations will be available in the gallery of the National Museum in Warsaw alongside the vases they are made from. They will all be available online alongside the existing animations and new activity sheets. I hope that you enjoy exploring the website and consider using the animations in the classroom, especially before or after a museum trip.
Bibliography/Related Works
Kozma, R.B. (1991) ‘Learning with Media’, Review of Educational Research, Vol. 61.2, pp. 179–211.
Nevin, S. (2015) ‘Animating Ancient Warfare: The Spectacle of War in the Panoply Vase Animations’, in War as Spectacle. Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Display of Armed Conflict, A. Bakogianni and V. Hope (eds.) Bloomsbury Academic Publishing: London. pp. 335–352.
Nevin, S. (2015) ‘Animations of Ancient Vase Scenes in the Classics Classroom’, Journal of Classics Teaching, Vol.16.(31) pp.32–37, DOI: 10.1017/S2058631015000057.
Smith, A. and Nevin, S. (2014) ‘Using Animation for Successful Engagement, Promotion, and Learning’, in Advancing Engagement: Handbook for Academic Museums, Volume 3, S. Jandl and M. Gold (eds.), MuseumsEtc Ltd: Edinburgh and Boston. pp.330–359.
Torre, D. (2014). ‘Cognitive Animation Theory: A Process-Based Reading of Animation and Human Cognition,’ Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9.1, pp. 47–64.
Wetterlund, K. (2008) ‘Flipping the Field Trip: Bringing the Art Museum to the Classroom’, Theory Into Practice, Vol.47.2, pp.110–117, DOI: 10.1080/00405840801992298
