Film
How can we share our research with other people and show all the beautiful stories, puppets and music we have created? A film!
We will put our stories, pictures, puppets and music together in a film so we
can show our art to everyone. We also wanted to see if we could film what we like and love and share our stories through stop motion animation.
To make a stop motion animation you make lots of different pictures of something that moves only a tiny bit. You then put all these pictures together and get a short film.
Diwas Bisht knows a lot about stop motion animation and he came to the school in Crewe to help us. We had to start with some good ideas. To do this we looked at what inspired us – our favourite things and places. Some of us drew our ideas on storyboards.
Our ideas were about:
Film
How can we share our research with other people and show all the beautiful stories, puppets and music we have created? A film!
We will put our stories, pictures, puppets and music together in a film so we can show our art to everyone. We also wanted to see if we could film what we like and love and share our stories through stop motion animation.
To make a stop motion animation you make lots of different pictures of something that moves only a tiny bit. You then put all these pictures together and get a short film.
Diwas Bisht knows a lot about stop motion animation and he came to the school in Crewe to help us. We had to start with some good ideas. To do this we looked at what inspired us – our favourite things and places. Some of us drew our ideas on storyboards.
Our ideas were about:
Diwas looked at all these ideas, put them all together and prepared a story for us to make in two workshops.
In London Karian worked with students who had chosen their favourite things and brought some of these to school. Together they made short stop motion animation films, which also used the student’s drawings and writing.
Diwas used the stop motion animation as well as all the other art we created as part of our research (the music, puppetry and stories) and he made a film for each school.
Click on the films if you want to see them:
Our Film, Springfield School, Crewe, UK
Our Story, Linden Bridge School, London, UK
Select to read more:
The workshops were great as we worked with some amazing young people. They were happy to listen to instructions and brilliant in working together. They worked out how to give everyone a turn, were happy to share their ideas and encouraged each other. I really loved working with the young collaborators, as they were so positive and enthusiastic about the results.
As practitioners we really learned a lot about giving instructions. In the morning group, the students needed a lot of visual and physical (hand-over-hand) prompts to follow what they had to do. There were a couple of times where I was worried about whether the activity was too complicated or required too much patience. I was so happy that I was wrong to worry. Although during the first week the morning group had difficulty with the instructions, during the second week most of the young collaborators had mastered a completely new set of skills. One of the young people was so excited after she had made her section of film that she ran around the room cheering.
What was also very interesting was the way that starting with the student’s interests or favourite places and items, helped them to become involved. The teacher supporting the session mentioned how impressed he was with the ideas of the young people and how their interests could be used to encourage their participation. What was also really interesting was the way in which we used the children’s artistic input by asking them to colour the characters or other items in the stories. The young people really took their time to work on these elements- none of them rushing to get them done. In the morning group we cut out some paper butterflies and asked the young people to add some colour. The results were stunning and the young people really loved seeing how their own butterfly was brought to life in the stop motion film.
