Plog

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..

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…

Inspired by a post we saw on the MAKE: blog, we decided to make our own vibrating robots with Newtons Walk school…

We’ve been looking for an excuse to get stuck into some electronics with a group for a long time - we do a lot of circuit mashing at home - and as they had all just watched Wallee we thought this would be the perfect time.

Soldering in school wasn’t an option so we just used terminal strip to hold the motor, LED and battery clip together. The weight on the end of the motor was a piece of wooden dowel drilled off centre - all easy for the pupils to assemble themselves with a screw little driver. After a busy morning of designing, making, building, wiring, and gluing, we all put our bots to the test in the drawing arena!

If you want to try this yourself use superbright red or yellow LEDs. There isn’t enough juice in 2 batteries to push the motor and blue or white LEDs too. Pupils used whatever they could lay their hands on from our big-plastic-junk-box, and we encouraged them to try different designs to see what worked - shifting the weight and balance, adding legs or ripping them off. It was a lot of fun!

QUAD employ us to work at Newtons Walk. Keep your eyes peeled for more Newtons Walk posts, and an upcoming exhibition at QUAD in July!

Last year, Creative Partnerships asked us to get involved with two induction sessions that they ran for teachers.  Whilst CP staff were busy explaining the details of working with CP, we were there to create a storyboard.

Filled with suggestions, ideas and discussion, the 2 days gave us loads of exciting ideas to take away… The resulting animation is a short film that shows the journey that schools go on when they work with CP .

Thanks go to all the teachers on the induction sessions, to CP staff Becky, Lucy and Carol, and to Jo Pindersmith and pupils at Annesley Primary School.

Last year Rosslyn Park Primary School’s Creative Journeys art club enjoyed exciting success with their racism film that they made for “Show Racism the Red Card”.  This year they wanted to enter the competition again, and to make another film…

Patterned birds and butterflies, rosy red apples, bright colourful t-shirts, sunshine, clouds, flowers, and a rainbow combine to tell their short story about colours, difference and sharing.

Creative Journeys Art Club is run by Bea Tobolewska, funded by Nottingham City Council and The Childrens Fund… We will be sad to see the end of this wonderful project, that we have been a part of for five years.

Apologies to our two readers (us) for the lack of any updates for geological ages - we’ve been excruciatingly busy with so many projects. What this will mean though, is lots more photos and videos to add very soon.

Speaking of which:

We’ve been trying to use blogs as a way to document projects and get schools to share and talk about what they’re doing. You can see how the experiment unfolds at the Creswell Roots site and Fountaindale Art Blog.

It’s a lot of work trying to keep everything updated, but it has been good to get things up online right away - hopefully the schools will take things further and we can take a rest!

Recently, we were asked to do something a bit different:

Our friend, David Matthews - whose theatre company VXII writes and directs interactive issue-based plays for young people in schools and youth centres - commissioned us to make a digital backdrop for his new play about cyber-bullying, ‘Toasted’.

We were charged with technical duties - creating animated backdrops of key scenes, as well as texts and instant messages that would appear back-projected onto a large screen to insult and confuse the bullied victim, and enable the audience to read the correspondence as it arrives.

The whole thing was controlled by the cast with a little slide show clicker, so they could respond and interact with the text and scenes as they chose. We had to work in response to how the actors used the images and text on stage experimenting with placement and timing. We were also able to add subtle sound effects relating to each scene - kind of important for the gaming bits, and quite atmospheric.

It was fun to see it all come together, from hazy beginnings and worries that the live action and the projected side wouldn’t mesh - to the point when it was almost seamless. The cast did an excellent job of using the technology. It’s hard to see how the play might have worked without the projected aspects - the instant messaging and texting are so integral to the story - which we suppose makes the experiment a success!

Ah! Unfortunately we didn’t get any video footage of the play in performance, but David emailed us a few photos from rehearsals… The show went on the road in November, a short run at schools in South Yorkshire.

This project was turned around super quickly really, considering how many elements had to work together, there was more than one night without sleep as technical problems and deadlines loomed! But we’re really excited by the idea of doing something like this again, with more time, on a more ambitious scale. Wow, the sorts of things that are possible…

We are often asked to work creatively with curriculum subjects.  Recently Newtons Walk pupils were learning about the Victorians, and we were excited to bring their lessons to life with animation!

Ideas of the past became real - thoughts of hot air balloons, Victorian explorers, steam engines and crazy inventions were captured in an animated film, when pupils used drawing, collage, colour, light and shadow to make an old fashioned looking film about what went on 100 years ago!

Our regular work in Newtons Walk PRU is organised by QUAD.

Just a quick note about something new that happened for us before the summer.

During the last Bang! film festival we were introduced to Leila, a student at a local school, and a talented artist. She was very forward thinking in organizing her own work placement, and one of the festival organizers pointed us out, thinking we’d be able to help. We thought it was a great idea! Something we hadn’t tried before which seemed like it could be an interesting challenge.

So after submitting to an interview for the school, it was agreed that Leila would work with us for 3 days on one of our projects.

Well, we just wanted to say what a positive experience it was for us! Leila was incredibly helpful, thoughtful and typically unfazed by a bellowing primary school class with earsplitting home-made musical instruments. A consummate professional.

It’s certainly something we’d like to do again, so if anyone is reading this (anyone???) - schools, pupils, parents - and is looking for (what we hope would be) an interesting work placement then we would love to help if we can.

We really should have Plogged about this earlier!