Kaimes School Workshops

A couple months ago I started working with the kids and teachers at Kaimes school, a special needs High school and Primary school, delivering animation workshops. Along with a fellow animation student Tyler and our co-ordinator Conrad, we worked with the kids over many weeks to try and get them to make decisions and lead a project using their own initiative and ideas, rather than being dictated by adults like they usually would be. It was a very challenging project and we faced alot of obstacles during the whole process but in the end we came out with a film and and a group of kids who learned how to work together and use their own initiative to achieve what they want, some of them even ended up with some pretty impressive animations.

On the first few sessions we were just trying to get to know them and see what they wanted out of the experience. After our first session we picked up that alot of the kids were into super heros and comic books so we made a couple avatars of superheros to try and get on their side.

He looks slightly chubby for a super hero but hey! I've never drawn one before!

We had lukewarm response. The truth was that we had a bit of an issue with seeing the kids, the only time we could have access to them was on a Friday when the majority of them went skiing for their free time. 

So we basically decided to just join them up the ski slope and integrate animation into their fun winter activities. 

In the first few sessions we made a compilation video of the kids on the ski slope to try and get them excited about what we were doing. the response was somewhat luke warm, they also weren't too keen on the dubstep royalty free music. 

From there we started to work on story boards and tried to engage the kids on figuring out what they wanted the film to look like, we used voting systems and encouraged teeeam work to try and get them to create a final idea. From their drawings and ideas we created a final story board and then began to work on the final film, we took some promising kids aside and taught them the basics of animation beginning with the mclaren app and then progrssing onto flash. All of which can be seen in this promotional video and the final animation we created. 

Speedy Skierz trailer from conrad molleson on Vimeo.

Speedy Skier from conrad molleson on Vimeo.