Maps, Animations, Puppets and Comics

Throughout March the team has been involved in another outing for the Creative Learning work which I have mentioned before in this blog (go ahead, search for Creative Learning and you’ll find the other posts). We have had two days of workshops – four different techniques in total. These were delivered by a team of artists (see more about them here)

Map making

We spent half a day learning how to make maps. Not just maps of streets that get us from A to B. The concept of maps can be very diverse. We learnt how to use maps to depict journeys, to show how things relate to each other, to show a journey through time and the events that took place. And the most interesting of all, was using maps to turn narrative into symbols that tell the story of a sequence of events. There were some incredibly useful concepts in this workshop.

Stop Frame Animation

We learnt how to use stop frame animation to make a film. We also made figures out of clay and used these to tell the story within the animation. Using simple software we were shown how easy it is to put together a small animation. The big issues here of course is the amount of time it takes to makes a small film. I reckon it took an hour to make less than a minute of film. Moving the figures a tiny amount and then taking a photo. The scope for using this as a technique is incredible. Above all else, it would be fantastic to use animation to replace powerpoint. Please tell me why we should still be using powerpoint to show an audience slide after slide of bullet points. Make a small animation instead…

Puppet making

We made sock puppets, we made puppets out of everyday objects, ourselves as puppets in masks. Then we made a puppet from rolls of paper – and then we made a life size version of a paper roll puppet. This was the point where we all became puppeteers. Three of us to move each puppet. We learnt a lot about ourselves, our levels of comfort and discomfort with the techniques we were trying out. I was incredibly impressed with the way in which an object could be given life, it could breathe and move in way that convinced and audience that it was alive.

Comic strip

Using photos, simple software and speech bubbles we put together comic strips. One group put together a comic that looked at whether comic strips can be used to convey research messages. It was a comic strip about comic strips – a meta-comic-strip – now that’s a meta-joke! The other group used the technique to describe their jobs. Making comic strips forces us to use images and clip the message down to short phrases. This is a really useful discipline.

All in all – four brilliant workshops delivered by an incredibly talented group of artists. They made it all look easy, and created safe space for us to experiment. I am definitely going to use some of these techniques again. And what a bonus to have a cartoon version of myself taken from the visual minutes that were produced of the day.