Never Work with Animals or Children: Cinekids Challenge (Unit 1 A Part 2)

For the last few weeks a lot of ideas and problems have been circling around my head about what I can do for our Future Producers Plus challenge of combining my primary art form with a new art form to create a piece of promotional material for the Watershed’s Cinekids workshops. However, I’m hoping over the course of this blog to get my thoughts and the problems I’m having with this challenge on paper. With any luck also I might even be able to write myself out of trouble.

I’m hoping this is possible given my primary art form is writing, which is something I have been doing on and off again throughout my life since primary school. Yet even at primary school when asked to write a very short short story, I found myself starting a novel with the plot, characters and settings already mapped out in my mind. This kind of approach to thinking big I still bring to creative projects and usually when I adapt my ideas to suit the piece I’m writing or directing I’m usually able to create the effect I was after.

This approach I have also brought to the challenge of combining my passion for writing with learning a new art in film making, which is something I have always wanted to be involved with and I feel naturally can compliment my love of creating stories from turning written words into performance pieces.

Yet I a previous blog (From the Fringe to the Frying Pan to Catching Up), I spoke about feeling there could be some issues with displaying in a more creative way the connection and influence of both my chosen art forms, writing and film making. So I thought a bigger, but found that creatively I was crippling myself by thinking too widely and complicatedly of how I would present my idea of film. I thought of the idea of making a promotional video for the Cinekids workshops that would focus on how films are made up of many ideas and pictures with each being ‘a picture worth a 1,000 words’ and tell stories like books but in a more visual way, which would show clearly my passion for writing, English and story-telling.

By incorporating into this potential promotional video this idea of how both art forms influence each other as they present stories in different ways that create a launching pad for kids and parents to think, learn and explore their creativity. This will show how both art forms are linked and influence each other and in the video will show more clearly show my primary art form.

The main problems I found that I was over thinking and over complicating in my head what I would need to show, thinking it is going to requires film skills or even animation skills beyond my experience. Something which I knew would not work well or be possible. It was a concern and worry in my head for a while until two weeks ago we had a film making workshop ran by Luke.

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(There I am. The tall blonde in the background taking notes)

During the workshop we had the chance to shot a short film a small bit of dialogue and learn about the different parts of how you would shot a scene. The one problem was that we did not have a script and no one, myself included felt comfortable coming up with an idea or just writing a few lines of dialogue. At the time I was worried I would not be able to write something simple or good enough that would last 60 seconds.

Our Gold Arts Award Leader, Claire Simmons, stepped in writing a short script about a magic umbrella without much thought. For a short film in the time we had, it was a solid idea which helped to make me realize that I do not need to over think my idea, but rather think of the easiest and best way to present it. I am since decided this will be the artistic challenge I want to take. To create a promotional video that is simple, yet includes these ideas of using films and their images that inspire conversation and creativity in kids.

In this way I would hope to solve my issues of being able to write to appeal to the children’s market in helping parents to see not only the value of films, but also the added bonuses of the workshops and inspirational effects they can have on their kids. As a challenge I this will push me creatively into new territory that could open up opportunities for me after the Future Producers scheme to apply these skills of film making and writing for a children’s audience in in my work and in projects I do with the kids I work with. Not only that but this would also provide me the challenge of applying the basic filming techniques I learnt in Luke’s workshop.

When it comes to who I would work with, as we are yet to decide among ourselves yet, would be someone I hope who is a practitioner who has film making experience or another participant of Luke’s workshop who help to work with a film camera who can make sure we are doing things correctly and provide another artist eye for what we create together. Also someone who has experience with marketing or working with kids in a different capacity to me to bring a different perspective to our Cinekids promotional piece.

At this stage my ideas will likely change but the way I want to combine both art forms I would like to retain. In terms of the development of the piece I work on the process will record in our group’s blogs, through photographs taken at each stage of the films development and physical evidence will appear in the form of script drafts and video footage.

Feedback for our promotional material would be easy to get as a short promotional trailer can be placed on social media and promotional websites such as Facebook and Youtube where users and viewers can provide feedback, both written but also in the form of ‘likes’ which will be visual for anyone to see and comment upon. It would also allow us to access and spread the video to a range of people within our audience and given the Watershed’s Cinekids workshops have been running for a few years showing the trailer before at a cinekids event to parents for feedback on the content and to check it appeals to them and their market would give us an advantage.

As of this moment the project is still in development and there is a lot more work to be done before things become final.