【Zimmer Twins】: Directing your own stories

What is The Zimmer Twins?

The Zimmer Twins (http://www.zimmertwins.com/) is known for its unique format which combines online participation and broadcast delivery. Young language learners are invited to create and share animated episodes using a story editor and library of animation. The users can either create endings to short, professionally produced story-starters or produce a totally new story based on their imagination. Users tell their stories by choosing characters, actions, props, expressions and settings. They can also add their own dialogue and on-screen text. Then, a selection of the user-generated episodes is produced into broadcast shorts and air on Teletoon, which is a Canadian Animation Network.

Below is an interesting Youtube video on "The Making of The Zimmer Twins" :

How to use The Zimmer Twins?

1. Click on the "Make a Movie" button and you will be brought to this page.

In order to have your clip saved, you must sign up yourself first to get an account for the Zimmer Twins page. After that, you can start making your own movie clip.  Click here to watch a tutorial clip on how to get started with your first Zimmer Twins movie!


1. You can either choose to create endings to short, professionally produced story-starters or produce a totally new story based on your own imagination. If you choose the previous, you need to pick a story-starter from the selection on the screen; but if you choose to create your own, you can click in the "Make From Scratch" button.

Then you will be brought to this story editor where you can start creating your story 

2. From the story editor, you can get many varieties of animation selection, such as you can choose your own characters, settings and props. After that, you are free to decide each character's facial expressions, emotions as well as actions. Also, you can add on dialogue and on screen text on your short animation clip. This is so fun! Even me as a teacher feel so exciting in creating my own animation. Look at the slide show below, it shows you a series of animated files which Zimmer Twins offers: 

3. After you have finished narrating your story, just click on "save movie" button before you put in a lovely title and short description for your story.

For more information on how to use the Zimmer Twins, please view the teaching video below prepared by Russel Stannard:  http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/zimmer/index.html

Why do teacher and students like the Zimmer Twins?

1. Autonomous learning 

Students will become more independent in learning because they are the one who in charge for every tiny part of their movies. They can do whatever they want, such as choosing their favourite characters, deciding on the characters' lines, story background and etc. Students' thinking skills can be also enhanced greatly as they produce the movies all by themselves, and perhaps with only some guidance from the teacher.

2. Fun and Motivating

Zimmer Twins offers different characters with different personalities and traits for the students to choose from. The characters can sing and dance, can travel on time and do some craziest stuffs. It totally opens up the door of possibilities of what the students can actually think of. The anticipation and preparation of students to add dialogue, select scenes and come up with their own story endings are absolutely worth while and amazing! It is really cool when you see that students come out with different stories every time and you can totally enjoy their awesomeness!

3. Sense of ownership

Students will have a sense of ownership towards their finished works because they have put in a lot of effort in organising their ideas and present their story in a nice and favourable way. Therefore, after putting in so much hard work, they will feel proud of it and enjoy the feeling when people appreciate their works.

How could Zimmer Twins be used in language learning context?

1.  Teacher sets a context and has the students to create a story about it

As you can see from the heading that a teacher can actually provide the students with an interesting title or context such as sports day, rescuing someone from a difficult situation, an argument and etc. Then gives the students more room to imagine themselves about how they want the story line to be. At the same time, the teacher can introduce the students to a meaningful set of vocabulary related to that particular context so that they can put the vocabulary items into usage when they are setting up their own stories. After all, the movie making has been turned into a kind of personal process where the students can do whatever they want in the movie before publish it to their audience. In fact, not only the activity encourages students autonomy and creativity, but also helps them in contextualising a situation/incident and learning to use suitable words to describe it.

2. Students create story endings based on the story starters

Like what you can see in Zimmer Twins' page, students are given the opportunity to continue progressing the story line of some uncompleted movies into the complete ones. Hence, the short plus professionally produced story starter can assist students to activate their background knowledge about some events, and then they come out with some extraordinary ideas to finish the story. Students are given freedom and right to decide how the ending of the story would be. Therefore, this can highly motivate them as different students have different creativity level. Besides, students will feel so much delighted if they can share and exchange ideas on each other's story.

Some limitations of The Zimmer Twins

1. Movie cannot be embedded

The biggest limitation of Zimmer Twins is it does not allow the users to embed their finished works into any other websites or blogs. This is kind of sad because students cannot share their works with other people who are not Zimmer Twins users.

2. Have to pay for VIP Membership

The users have to purchase VIP membership so that they can publish their movies publicly and have other users watching them.