Free family animation day launches View from Here! We found out what to expect

The View from Here film festival launches with a free family animation workshop in Newton Abbot, on Saturday, November 28. We caught up with Lucy Jackson of Creative Workshops for Children, who is running the family animation day, to find out what will be in store

Explain a little about the work of  Creative Workshops for Children.

Creative Workshops for Children is run by artists Lucy Jackson and Andy Coombes. We provide high-quality creative workshops and projects for children of all ages and abilities.

Much of our recent work has involved working with groups of children to create  stop motion, animated films. We work in schools, shopping centres, museums, galleries, youth groups and community venues and have helped young people create films on a huge range of subjects from the issue based: global warming, anti bullying, sustainable fishing to historical; romans, egyptians and how to survive the stone age to animated poems, plays, stories and more abstract moving shapes and colours.

Our workshops offer anything from a short taster session to a several week film making project.

The family animation day kicks off the View from Here film festival. What’s in store for the event?
Participants will have the chance to have a go at some different sorts of animation from simple drawings in flickbooks, and zoetropes and praxinascopes – which you spin to create the illusion of movement to  stopmotion animation using laptops, cameras and computers. creating.

Throughout the day we will be creating a short film and will be inviting families to create characters using lots of different materials and then have a short go at animating them. The end result will be a two to three minute film which we will post on Youtube for people to see.

What skills, if any, do you need for animation?
Patience and imagination. Anybody can make animation and you can animate almost anything!

People have always been attracted to animation and telling stories, however small, why do you think that is?
Animation has a magical quality that captures people’s imagination. Stop motion animation has a lovely, playful, homemade quality which appeals to people especially at a time when so much of what we see is  so slick and perfect looking.

What do people take from being involved in animation workshops?
A fun, postive experience, confidence in their ability to create, tell a story, make a film, record sound, edit and work with others.

Lucy Jackson, thank you

Check out some of the work of Creative Workshops for Children on Lucy’s Youtube channel