A lunchtime club at Glossopdale school – making a stop motion animation.Glossopdale Film Cuts Club started meeting on Friday lunchtimes in October 2010, in the Learning Support classroom. The group is made up of around 8 core members with others dropping in to help when needed, for instance giving feedback on our ideas.The project aims to provide activities including animation techniques, creative writing, acting, technical skills in camera work, directing and editing on computer.Employing a film maker who is experienced in community workshops, they have a good understanding of the issues the young people face. They structure the sessions to build on social interaction, peer support, team working and sharing a common goal.
In the early sessions we developed a storyline which included ideas from every member of the group, and worked on the groups dynamics.Squeezed into a lunchtime these sessions offered barely more than 30mins of productive time, so when we were given the chance to use a MediaBox bursary in December – thanks to Kim Johnson from Derbyshire County Council – we added a new session on a Tuesday afternoon with animator, Alex Kelly, from Stockport College. These sessions ran through to early February, with activities divided between fabrication of the scenery and characters, script writing, audio recording and shooting of the animation frames. Due to time constraints Alex took the footage, audio and chosen soundtrack and put it together into the finished film.
The group continued to meet on Friday lunchtimes to carry on with their Arts Awards, with Andrew working towards Silver, and Lee and Paige working towards Bronze.
Some additional sessions with extra participants were planned for Andrew to complete his leadership project.
At times it was stressful, I felt like we weren’t really going anywhere, people were holding everything up, but um, in the end after some swift and um discipline, as you can imagine, we eventually, well we didn’t manage to finish all of the 6 scenes that we planned to do, but we did most of them, which is generally enough to say that we’ve done it! This is something that we can show and be proud of.
Andrew, on his leadership project
The Dark Devil was screened, along with a few others, at “Short Cuts” on 17th March, 7pm at The Studio Theatre, Buxton Pavilion Arts Centre.
As part of the MediaBox bursary scheme it was also included on the Derbyshire County Council DVD ‘Parachute’, and screened at the Donut Centre, Chesterfield.
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