Visitors to Mansfield Museum are being invited to get hands-on with the artworks in AniMotion, a specially-commissioned exhibition inspired by animation techniques.

It will run from Saturday until Saturday, 1st April. The museum is free to enter.

Visitors can watch as their faces come to life as on-screen winged creatures, which flap and fly around; they can try out an Oculus Rift headset and enter an imaginary animated world; or transform the features of a huge Day of the Dead inflatable skull and watch its hypnotic animated eyes.

They will meet Morph, celebrated early star of Aardman Animations, see their face come to life as it flies around with wings, watch friends become skeleton avatars and create their own animations with a little help from the world-famous Aardman studios.

Visitors to the exhibition will enter a magical world that has been created especially for them by some of the UK’s most imaginative and award-winning artists and animators.

The exhibition features several animation techniques, from Zoetropes through to CGI. Several commissioned artists have produced contemporary pieces of work that illustrate these different techniques and all these pieces have been designed to be enjoyably interactive.

The animators and artists chosen for these commissions include:

Aardman Animations have produced a set of ‘Animation Stations’: interactive tables which allow visitors to play and experiment with animation and have a go at using the Animate It software to create their own mini animation.

Alongside this, there is a display featuring Morph, the animated clay character that made his TV debut in 1977 in BBC children’s art programme Take Hart.

Created by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, the co-founders of Aardman Animations, Morph went on to become a regular fixture on children’s television throughout the 70s and 80s. After almost 40 years Morph returned in 2014 for a new series of adventures. Staying true to the original format, these episodes were shot using clay and traditional stop-frame animation in Morph’s original home at the Aardman studios in Bristol.

Chris Squires’ ‘Wing / Face’ is a multi-screen projection featuring flocks of live generated, animated bird-winged creatures, each with the face of a visitor mapped onto it.

David Urwin’s The Nature of Imagination is a work that encourages people to see the beauty of others’ imaginations. Using a virtual reality headset, visitors can observe and interact with an imaginary world full of animation.

Eleanor Meredith, BAT Studio and The Workers have created an absorbing and ever-evolving stop motion animation, where visitors to the exhibition become the star of the show.

Mark Hewis’ beautiful living ‘Slow Zoetrope’ is the antithesis of a normal zoetrope. Rather than revolving at high speed, Mark’s Zoetrope moves very slowly a couple of times a day. This minute movement is captured on film and is pieces together to create an ever-growing film.

Spacecadets have designed and constructed a Day Of The Dead inspired, inflatable sugar skull. The eyes of the skull are projected with Phenakistoscopes, an early animation device that uses a spinning disk of sequential images and the persistence of vision principle to create the illusion of motion.

Michele Panegrossi and Aye Aye’s Synchronicity is a playful installation of origami paper constructions which spring to life when visitors pass their hands over the top of these shapes.

AniMotion is the second exhibition in a two-part project which has been funded by Arts Council England. The first was an exhibition all about the well-known children’s illustrator and author, Nick Sharratt, and his work.

This exhibition has been supported using public funding by Arts Council England.