Plog

This year’s Bang! Festival at Broadway is going to be a good one - we’re already looking forward to it…  Spread over 3 days, and celebrating it’s 10th birthday, we just can’t wait!

As usual we bombarded them with our recent films! Watch out for a selection of modern day myths - Medusa, Minotaur, Cyclops and Daedalus & Icarus, as well as some living cave art in Stone Age Stories

See you there?!  27th, 28th and 29th of November

Meden School are working with BSF - Building Schools for the Future - to build and develop their school.

Miss Musson, Head of Performance, asked us to work with a team of BSF Arts pupils for 3 days, to bring together their ideas for a new school using film and animation; students considered how to develop skills and learning in creative arts, and ways of integrating this into the rest of school.

The resulting film was meant to be 2 minutes, but with so many great ideas and brilliant bits of footage, it turned out to be six! Please take a look…

If you’ve been involved in this project - students, school staff, BSF team, anyone - please add your comments below!

The challenge was set by The Mighty Creatives - to make six short films, in six days, with with six (or seven!) pupils in each of the six schools…

Off we went - filming, animating, acting, drawing, photography, interviews, sound recording - we used a huge range of techniques to capture pupils thoughts about their work with Creative Partnerships.

The six schools were all involved in the first year of CP work in Lincolnshire - each school worked with different practitioners, and ran different projects. The films visually reflect the nature of the projects, whilst taking a focus on pupil involvement and their points of view.

Throughout our adventures we kept a blog, click below to see what happened and watch the films..

Imagine a festival somewhere in a parallel universe… Where giant slugs serve pizza and guinea pigs eat pies, romance blossoms for penguins and portaloos, monster musicians play on stage, kitchen utensils form a band, and the crowd contains all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures! Here it is…

Almost 100 short animations made by hundreds of young people, in a few hours, in a big red tent.

This, our fourth time at the greenman, was exciting and fun - we worked with more young people than ever before, and we were really impressed with the ideas, patience, creativity and skills that we saw! Well done to all who took part.

Thanks to Ste and Sian, Emily, Eileen and all the crew in the kids area, and also to Remix, who very kindly let us use the music that young people made with them during the festival.

(See the comments for animation software tips and links)

It’s that time of year, the sun is shining and we’re off to the Green Man festival!

When the weekend is over, we’ll be adding this year’s Green Man Animations here. Watch this space! In the meantime you can have a look at what we’ve done before - here, here, and here

If you’re a greenman goer, and get/got involved with animating, then please let us know what you think, by adding your comments below. Thanks.

Find out what else is on at QUAD or see some of the films we’ll be showing on our vimeo or youtube pages

Over 2 days, two Year 10 groups worked hard to build large head sculptures. They designed and planned, constructed and clad bamboo cane and wire structures, and brought them to life in a darkened room, by projecting weird and wonderful animated facial features and sounds… Everyone worked with real talent.

A cow moos - a skull ignites - barbie girl sings - growling -  yawning - crying - slurping - an eye explodes - a geek looks geeky -  and she says blah, blah, blah! (we still can’t get it out of our heads).

In amongst all of this, a few pupils found a spare 5 minutes to make this odd little animation too!

We had a good time working in London. Thanks to all of you who were involved, you were fun to work with, - we think you should all be really proud of the results.

What really inspired us was how different everyone’s finished pieces came out - the Easter Island face really fitted the structure perfectly, the same goes for the geek, such detail. The robot/stand/mega-structure a masterpeice of engineering! The exploding skull was a shock, there was an audible gasp from everyone when it blew up. There was real attention to the details too - the tear falling, nostrils flaring, incredible mustache. The cow chewing and mooing gave us all a laugh. Sand animation mixed with photographs and a hand made mouth, put together for a strange and wonderful effect. The beautiful blah blah woman batting her eyelids…

Thanks to you too Mr Fullwood - it was great to work with you too, after so long talking about it!

For the past few weeks we’ve been helping people at the Emmanuel school work towards their Bronze art award… A whirlwind project, super-quick stencil making, cutting, spraying, and scrubbing paint off our hands.

We barely had time to delve into the complexity of different techniques, but hopefully the whole thing has been inspiring - we hope that some people might have the confidence now to use stencils and sprays in other artwork. It was a real pleasure to work with the year 9 pupils - everyone has worked incredibly hard and achieved so much. We just wish we’d had longer… We’ll add more pictures once the boards are finished. In the meantime, if you worked with us on this project, please tell us what you thought! Leave any comments below.

If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, be sure to visit the Montana shop - a wonderful world of colours, cans, paints and pens.

This was a Creative Partnerships project and involved 2 more artists, Rachel making masks and Julie exploring set design with other year 9 pupils - we’re looking forward to seeing what they’ve been up to…

The Camden Green Fair didn’t happen this year, instead they are busy preparing for their 20th year in 2010. They have been making a documentary to tell the Fair’s history…

We got involved with the Fair last year (see this post) after meeting Charlie - one of the organisers - at the Green Man Festival…

A year on and she got back in touch to ask us to contribute to the documentary. We have made these three really really short animations based on the CGF daisy logo to add a little bit of flower shaped fun to their film! We sewed a daisy and rigged it with wire, then animated it opening in different ways - see how in the video and watch the clips below (blink and you’ll miss them).