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Butterflies for Kids The Story of Cathy the Caterpillar |
Once there was a tiny white egg on a green leaf.
After some time suddenly a black head appears and a small caterpillar crawls out of the egg. Her name is Cathy. She is very hungry so she eats up the rest of the egg. Now she feels a bit better. So she looks for something else to eat. The leaf looks very appetizing so she starts eating it. Every day Cathy eats a lot because she is always hungry. So she grows very fast and one day her skin gets too tight. It bursts open and Cathy strips it off.
Now she looks different. She is black with light stripes. She keeps on feeding and skins again.
After some time she feels like hanging on a leaf. Then she strips off her skin again and a green pupa comes out. When Cathy has found a comfortable position she doesn’t move any more. The days go by and Cathy’s color slowly changes from green to black. You can already see her black and orange wings shining through the skin of the pupa. One day the pupa opens and a brightly colored butterfly comes out.
Cathy is happy because she could leave the tight case of pupa. She straightens her wings, gives them time to dry and starts her first flight.
She soon finds a nice partner to mate with. Then she sits down on a leaf to lay her first egg.
- Start /stop film by clicking on the button.
- change the film’s speed by changing the
number above
(pictures per milli second), stop the film first
*In order to view the MPEG, you must have a program that plays MPEGs such as Microsoft Media Player downloadable from Microsoft's website (www.microsoft.com).
How Cathy learned to move or how do you do a trick film
If you want to do a trick film, the first thing you have to
look for are "actors". Our "actors" were several
caterpillars, an egg and a butterfly made of plasticine.
Then you can start doing the film. A film consists of many pictures which
appear so close one after another that you can't see the single pictures. Your
eye thinks the object on the pictures is really moving. When you take a
"normal" film the camera takes a mass of single pictures. For a
trick film you must take each single picture yourself. This means you take a
photo of the caterpillar, then move it a tiny little bit, then take the next
photo, move the caterpillar and so on. If you want the caterpillar to grow in
the film you have to replace it by one which, besides being a tiny little bit
bigger, looks exactly the same as the first one.
When you put all the single pictures together afterwards and make them appear
quickly one after another they will form a film.
Normally 18 pictures are needed to do one second of a trick film.
