“Design for Dreaming” children workshops and cultural exchange
The Design for Dreaming workshops were organized in collaboration with the small world project in London and Hong Kong. They taught children how to create a storyboard based on pre-existing movie shots. The workshops were the occasion for them to gain independence from prescribed moving images, to express their imagination and to exchange videos between continents. Here are their videos and a description of how it all happened.
Initially, the Design for Dreaming workshop was a one-off organized at the occasion of the Dreams of Progress exhibition and the Children’s Art Day 2009. The project started when Rossella Black from the Westminster Reference Library asked for a workshop idea that could fit in the Children’s Art Day. I suggested to her a storyboarding workshop, inspired by the collaborative project ‘Same video, different use’ from the video artist Remyyy. She liked the concept, I prepared the workshop and we ran it together, here are more details on how it went.
Everyone listening at the story of the second group (London's first workshop)
A little later, I have been contacted by Nathan Johnston from the small world project, which is a group of very dynamic people organising international media-arts workshops that gives students the opportunity to creatively share their world. They liked the concept of the Design for Dreaming workshop and proposed to use the same format with a class of Hong Kong pupils. English was not the first language of the Hong Kong secondary school students (aged 12-16), which added a new dimension to the exercise. I wrote a step-by-step documentation of the workshop and sent Nathan all the material. He did an amazing job at replicating the format and adapting it to the cultural context of a school from an isolated area of Hong Kong.
A group debating a scene of the storyboard (Hong Kong's workshop)
Children were first presented with the Design for Dreaming video. They were then split in small groups, each having in front of them a little less than a hundred printed images representing scenes from the movie. The groups had more or less an hour to create their storyboard, made of scenes from the original movie and of texts that they could add in between. Besides the fun and practical experience gained from the workshop, the children also learned how the same video footage can be sequenced to create many different stories; how what is showed everyday on TV is not an exact representation of reality but the result of a montage. Here are some examples of what they did. You can find all of them on the Small World vimeo group.
Design for Dreaming – Children’s Art Day 2009 from Christophe Bruchansky on Vimeo.
A Surprise in the Night from therese on Vimeo.
The Dream Came True from Nathan Johnston on Vimeo.
One of the most valuable part of this collaboration was the opportunity to share post-workshop lessons with Nathan Johnston, a very talented professional within Art Education. Both in Hong Kong and London, we saw how it was a big step for children to understand that they can manipulate movie shots and create a storyline different from the video they have just seen. But it required only a little perseverance to see them gaining independence from the moving images. The Design for Dreaming original video and its dreamy images also helped the children unleash their creativity without being too restricted by rationality.
