Here are step-by-step manuals documenting the workshops that have been organized as part of the Welcome to My Place activities. They are all free and under a Creative Commons License. Please check more details about the licenses inside each document.

These manuals can be used as:

1. Tools to better understand the identity of a place or an area (in the context of an ethnographic study for example).
2. Introductions to a collective urban planning effort (e.g. design charrette) or in combination with a community mapping exercise (see for example http://www.mappingforchange.org.uk).
3. Introductions to video making and subjective maps.

Welcome to My Place – video workshop manual: This manual is based on the workshops organised in February 2010 for the Transition Finsbury Park association, and on individual contributions to the Welcome to My Place project. Participants are invited to choose places that are important to them, optionally within a defined perimeter, and to welcome viewers in videos no more than one minute long. Read here a review of how it went for us.

Welcome to My Place – subjective maps workshop manual: This manual is based on the March 2010 workshop organised for the Transition Finsbury Park association. Participants are invited to draw subjective maps of their neighbourhood and to discuss the area. Read here a review of how it went.

As part of the Children’s Art Day 2009 and the Dreams of Progress exhibition, a storyboarding workshop was organised for the pupils of the year 4 from St Clement Danes School. Children learned how to create storyboards from pre-existing video material. Besides the fun and practical experience gained from the workshop, kids also learned how the same video footages 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.

Children used the footages from the  utopian video ‘Design for Dreaming’ (General Motors  – 1956) to create their storyboards. The workshop was inspired by the ‘Same video, different use’ collaborative project initiated by the video artist Remyyy; where artists can each post online their remixes of the same archive video. The best storyboard from the workshop has been transformed in a movie and posted online next to the contribution from video artists.

Winning storyboard of the year 4 from St Clement Danes School.

During the workshop, children were first presented with the original video. I showed them thereafter an example of storyboard (two of them were created before the workshop:  ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘I had a freaky nightmare’). The kids were split in 4 groups, each having in front of them a little less than a hundred printed images representing scenes from the movie. They randomly picked up a sentence to start their story with, e.g. “1..2..3..Action!”,  “This is the future”, “Dance to my beat”, “It was a freaky nightmare”. The groups had 40 minutes to create their storyboard, made of scenes from the original movie and of texts that they could add in between. In the last 10 minutes of the session, the groups presented their storyboard to the rest of the class, so that pupils could vote for their favourite story.

The winners when they presented their storyboard to the rest of class.

Everyone listening at the story of the second group.

The third group busy making their own story.

The fourth group starting their storyboard with the teachers.

The storyboard of the fourth group.

The children didn’t have any problems understanding the concept of sequencing movie scenes. The main challenge they experienced was to not replicate the original film but to invent a new story; which they succeeded after a short time necessary to distance themselves from what they’ve just seen.

The storyboarding workshop would not have run so smoothly without the commitment of Rossella Black from the WRF, all the volunteers helping out preparing the session and the facilitation of the teachers from St Clement Danes School.