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..

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.

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!

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.

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…

A while ago we were asked to make a film for young people (linked to The Big Spring Clean), that could help to highlight the problems that litter can cause.  Residents in Aspley, Nottingham, had been talking about their concerns of rubbish on the streets, this is the result…

When Paul and Laura in Children’s Services first got in touch, we quickly decided that the film would need to balance a strong positive message about litter with lots of fun and excitement.  Who wants to watch a film that lectures them about dropping litter and getting a fine?!

So, a story took shape - inspired by a fairy tale - that would include local members of Streetscene (the good folks who try their best to keep our streets looking tidy even if we don’t), Community Protection Officers, working alongside young people to combat evil animated litter characters! The whole thing is supposed to be about the community working together.

The next step was getting stuck in with the Eco Team at Ambleside Primary school, to make the film - it was brilliant fun.  The four days that we spent with them were incredibly busy, crammed full of loads of activities; to draw and design backgrounds for the scenes, teach them about the basics of stop motion animation, get the rubbish and it’s facial expressions moving, and to record sound effects and character voices.

This, combined with one day of filming the live-action stuff with all the humans in, gave us a huge amount of editing to do!  Slowly, one by one, we have built up the layers of the film - the backgrounds first, which we overlaid with the live-action sequences, followed by the animated rubbish and it’s expressions, and lastly the sound, voices and music too. Phew! (It’s also our first experiment with filming in high definition, see it in HD here.)

It’s hard for us to watch the film now - we’ve seen it so many times, and we still see things we’d like to change - could it be faster or brighter?  We wish that we could have got some people from other ethnic backgrounds in there too, that’s what Nottingham is like, a real mix. Still, we’re really proud of what everyone did and how hard they worked.

Please share this film, we hope you’ll enjoy it and that it might make you laugh, but litter on our streets is pretty serious, it’s smelly, ugly, inconsiderate… Just not good at all! Can you clean up your act?

Thanks to Ambleside Primary School, Mr Forshaw, and last years’ Eco Team, also to the actors - Anthony, Bianca, Kara, Jake, Phil, Craig and Ian, and to those behind the scenes - Lee-Anne, Laura and Paul.

Pupils in year 7 at All Saints school (where we previously painted the walls) worked together to make a short french film about the busy weekend of ‘Samuel’ and his friends. In just four short days the 60 students got involved in character and set building, drawing story boards, controlling the lights, cameras, and computers, and creating their own little sequences of animation in teams.

It was a really fun project. But very hectic! If we’d had more time the characters could have had armatures, that would have been ideal. As it was, under the lights and with the hot summer sun, the models became quite floppy and squashed by the end! In defiance of the pressures though, the students created some great work, really imaginative and we saw some very talented modelers and animators.

The film has been premiered at school, seen by staff and other pupils, and will be used as a resource for future curriculum work around hobbies and leisure. The hope is that other new resources with grow around it - worksheets based on the characters and story, questions about the various scenes… It was also a great way for the students to absorb French vocabulary, and if we do this again that’s an aspect we’ll try to focus more on.

This was a Creative Partnerships BAM project.