Acknowledgement of Country
Our school sits beside Lake Colac at the foothills of Red Rock and on the lush green land that has been cared for by generations of the Gulidjan people from the Maar Nation. Today we recognise their long history with this beautiful land we call home. We will always remember that our community learns, grows and plays upon traditional Gulidjan land and we pay our many respects to elders past, present and emerging.
Together we touch the ground of the land (touch ground)
We reach for the sky that covers the land (raise hands)
We touch our hearts to care for the land (touch our hearts)
Penelope & Laura Physical Theatre warm up & exercises
Laura – working towards devising.
Children in pairs, one hands on hips one hands on head. Separated these into two groups, made one inner circle and outer circle, using the pairs.
Then, sculpting their partner, like they are clay, using consent, to make statues.
“Can I move your leg” (by touching) or, “Can you move your hip like this” (by modelling).
Laura explained consent, and it’s ok to say no, but have the partner explain the movement (modelling). Then children were asked to add in an expression on face. “Close one eye, and be really sad”.
Then the circles moved, and they had new partners, and then made new statues in clay.
Then, Laura added in the idea of something more abstract.
Swapping partners each time, and switching from inner to out circle to make sure that turns were being taken to sculpt and be sculpted. She asked the children to sculpt a:
· Brave and determined rosella
10.10.55: Devising Lab: Penelope and Laura.
Penelope and Laura divided the kids into groups of four, and there was one sculptor and three pieces of clay. They made a:
The groups were asked to think about perspective/audience point of view (POV).
Fantastic to hear and see the children learning about consent. They picked this up immediately.
Sessions 2 and 3 with divided class.
We began the session with the children’s assignment to their roles on the production. Most children were assigned to their first choice. The kids needed some clarification about what the roles really meant, which we defined for them. In discussion with Jade during the session, we realised that there was a communication glitch between artists and teachers, which Jade and Penelope have resolved (good teamwork!).
Penelope and Jason introduced the animation desk, and Penelope described what we will be doing over the next weeks as we lead into production. Using the Pelican and Rosella story, we will tell this story using two quite different artforms: animation and live performance, specifically silhouette work. Penelope did a quick demonstration of silhouette work for children who weren’t here when she showed the vide, by using a piece of A4 paper held up to light, and placing her hand behind it, so children understood what silhouette means. With the second group, we discussed how will use cardboard to create the silhouette body parts to create the images/characters. We also brainstormed how to show tricky things in the silhouette live performance and the animation, such as, how do we show the rosella in the pocket-beak of the pelican.
Here are suggestions and ideas children proposed:
· X-ray vision (cellophane blue water)
· POV of rosella – red inside of the mouth
· Two bodies creating the mouth and then inside the mouth is the rosella – or through cardboard.
After the roles being given out, children were assigned to work with either Jason, on puppet design drafts, or with Laura on creating Tableaux. Laura worked through the story actions from the Storyboard Outline Scenes drafted by Penelope over the weekend, so we have a first draft version of silhouette for each scene. In the last group, we had an extra 5 minutes so Laura added in one movement and one sound into each Tableaux.
The children began puppet design drafts with Jason. We had planned the following:
· PELICANS - DRAW FROM PHOTOS
But with both groups, Jason focused on design from a photo of a pelican flying. We have 9 designs from which Jason will either select one for puppet design, or a conglomerate of two or more.
Laura and Penelope led the performance kids plus all others not assigned to design:
We divided children into 10 small groups (of 3 or 4) and gave each group a scene to represent through sound (by writing a list of all the sounds they imagined would be in the scene) and a 3-part storyboard of the action, with a beginning middle and end. Children struggled with the 3-part storyboard, with many of the groups simple deciding that each person would draw one element of the storyboard without considering the cohesiveness of the overall visuals or consideration of the point-of-view/from which angle the story was told. Laura and Penelope realised that we need more shared/collaborative story telling work to make this easier. This exercise was too much of a leap from individual 3-part storyboarding, and the connection between the collaboration in the theatre games was also “lost in translation”. We planned to create a way to remedy this in tomorrow’s sessions.
Jason and the design team
In order to generate the material for a rosella puppet, Jason worked with his design team of 9, to create rosella designs. This was very similar to what the design teams did in sessions 2 & 3 with the rosella. So have now 9 rosella designs from which Jason will wither select one for puppet design, or a conglomerate of two or more.
Today’s reflection was “hosted” by Laura, with prompting questions from Penelope (who documented along the way as Laura fielded answers.
What are you most excited about today?
· Making puppets in the design team
· The production as a whole
How did you find the exercise of coming up with sounds to the line of action?
· I found it easy to come up with a bunch of sounds by putting myself into the character’s perspective
· I listened to the sound walk, and thought about sounds that I know from the lake
Design team – Pelican and Rosella, what where your take-aways?
· Sketch isn’t just one and only idea, but you need to draw over and over again.
· Challenging to find out where all the moving parts will be.
· It was fun! Drawing and taking my time with that was enjoyable.
The team started with a bang entering the school this morning. Jason worked like a machine, putting together a silhouette screen and then building elements of the animation table in preparation for the session. Laura madly created materials for the sessions today while Penelope updated all the blog notes and edited photos from yesterday. Callum’s train behaved today, and he’s ready to go!
Warm up & focus with Laura
Children were asked to create a mime based on a movie theme – they were great at this, and really enjoyed the game. This exercise lead into the next game.
Kids were broken into teams and stand in a line facing one person at the front of their line. Each team is given cards with emotions written on them. The person at the front of the line picks up a card from the ground, reads it, puts it behind them on a pile face down, and then mimes what was written on the card. Once the team members in the line work out what’s written on the card, then they shuffle positions, the leader going to the back of the line, and there’s a new leader. It’s a competition, so the team who finishes first – successfully completes all the. Mimes, wins.
This exercise is great for building skills in collaboration and teamwork, and for inventiveness, expressiveness and creation in physical theatre.
Kids Feedback - What did you learn about Mime?
Telepathic twin connections don’t work.
Kids didn’t really give loads of feedback, so Laura explained how you need to make your mime to give children the capacity to be more expressive physically.
Kids were sat down and were clarified as to what, where and who in regard to the performance/gallery/animation
Why am I in two different roles?
· Not all roles have jobs to do at the moment, so will be working with different teams until those roles have jobs (i.e., stage management, catering, curators, etc.)
What is stage management?
· Organisation of students backstage to ensure the performers know when to go on stage. Super organised
Are there different roles that haven’t come up yet?
· We’re not sure, some roles will appear as the process goes along. Roles will be built from the interests that appear from the students.
What are Jason, Callum, Laura, Penelope doing?
· We’re the heads of the departments, we facilitate the different major areas.
What are assistant directors?
· Leadership role within their groups (Animation and Live performance). Help the team leaders organise and
What will the design team do while the performance is happening?
· Everyone contributes to the animation. Once the major design of the animation is done, the team will move onto design for live performance. During the performance, design team can sit back and relax and watch the performance.
Students teach the artists their Acknowledgement of Country
Laura and Penelope stood in front of the children, and the children taught them the acknowledgement. The kids broke it down into bite-sized chunks for the artists to learn.
It was great for the children to be the teachers, and for them to see adults learning from them. This was very much a true representation of how Barking Spider Creative works with kids. Co-learning, co-creation and collaboration.
Our school sits beside Lake Colac, at the foothills of Red Rock and on the lush green lands that have been cared for by generations of Gulidjin people from the Marr Nation. Today we recognise their long history with this beautiful land that we call home. We will always remember our community learns, grows, and plays upon traditional Gulidjin land we call. We pay respects to the Elders past, present and emerging. We touch the ground of the land, we reach for the skies that covers the land and we touch our hearts that care for the land.
Locking Down the Narrative
Storyboard Scene Clarification with Penelope
Penelope discussed the story arc, and that there seemed to be two ideas that had arisen from the original story: that the pelican was greedy and had eaten all the fish/food from Colac Lake, and that the lake is polluted. Penelope discussed with the children about strength of story. If a story has local relevance, it’s good, but if a story can have relevance that’s global and local, it’s great. This kind of narrative has more meaning to more people.
So, the Pelican is greedy and eats all the fish VS the pelican is hungry because there are less fish because of pollution, the latter is a localised and global choice right now.
Here is an example of what we worked on/trouble-shot:
EXISTING STORY: “Once upon a time there was a pelican who was selfish and has been taking all the food and saving it in its huge beak”.
SETTING: A polluted Colac Lake.
PROBLEM: We have a selfish pelican and a polluted lake. Can there be an abundance of food in a polluted lake? Is not the polluted lake the fundamental problem (and therefore is more interesting/of greater relevance).
· Less bugs, less fish, less wildlife in a polluted lake
If the pollution has created less food for the birds, that’s a problem for not just the birds, but the world. Rubbish, plastic bags = environmental impact.
Local significance + global problem
The pollution is the problem, not the pelican.
The children understood this, and so the discussion moved onto how the narrative can shift, and whether we want to provide a solution to the pollution and thereto the pelican’s hunger.
Penelope asked the children to focus on two key words: magic and transformation.
With both animation and with theatre, it’s possible to make the impossible happen.
To the question: what can happen in the story that transforms the pollution? These were the first responses:
To this idea, Penelope said that this difficult to show, but if you have ideas on how a dream would transform/work , then yes)
· A magic unicorn comes and eats all the rubbish.
To which Penelope responded and introduced the idea that we don’t want to introduce any new characters from outside the world of the lake. She explained that to make an affective, strong story, we want to stick with the characters/environment we have.
More responses and ideas from the children:
· Every animal has a second life in a perfect world (Penelope explained that this could be too long to develop and create in the timeframe we have)
· The pelican’s laugh makes everything go back to normal - When the pelican was sad and hungry, the world was polluted, but when she laughed, it woke up the lake and it transforms.
· The lake runs on happiness. (How?)
· All of the pelicans could come and clean up the lake. (Great idea – this connects with Jason’s idea of bringing in all the pelicans the design team kids have generated).
· A whirlpool opens up and swallows all the rubbish and the lake is clean again. (Big transformation -
· The birds apologise to each other and when they hug, the pollution disappears (that makes the pollution the animal’s fault)
· All the main characters start an uprising against the humans (we don’t have any humans in the story and that would be a big political thing)
What is a piece of rubbish that could transform into something else?
· Plastic bag (representing all pollution) turns into a fish.
· Wind blows up all the rubbish and turns it into fish and it rains fish.
· All the rubbish all turns into fish.
· Plastic bag turns into a fish, and it eats all the rubbish and gets really huge and flies into the sky and explodes and it rains fish. The scales could turn into other fish.
The story ending we have gone with:
· Beside the pelican, a plastic bag transforms into a fish.
· This fish jumps into our pelican’s mouth and she swallows it.
From across the lake, all the pelicans fly in and land, ready to eat or begin eating, fish.
· A group of rosellas does a fly-over.
Jason animation workshop and demonstration
Jason began the session with a discussion and description of animation. Jase had (seriously) whipped together an animation based on the characters the kids came up with.
He talked about and showed the effects of various frame speeds – frames per second, and asked hit kids to do the maths on what this means for our animation project. Jason:
· Spoke to the way puppets can be designed for movement and animation through paper.
· Spoke about basing puppets on real life creatures and how to design them so their movements look realistic.
· Demonstrated this with the rosella and flying fox puppets he had created and the animation.
He created this in 42 shots, of the flying fox flying over the rosella who is opening and shutting her beak
· Jason spoke about how film is mostly 24-60 frames per second.
· Jason explained what a frame is. 5 frames per second means 5 photos per second, when Jason demonstrated slowing down the frame rate the kids mentioned the movement looked “jumpy”.
· Jason spoke about how the camera (the phone) needs to stay really still when doing stop motion.
· Jason changed it from 5 frames per second to 10 frames per second, and then to 30 frames a second which meant the whole video lasted for just over a second. The kids then asked what is the slowest it could go, then Jason demonstrated one frame per second to give them an idea of how little the puppets move per photograph. It was decided we as a group will do 10 frames per second.
Penelope then showed a Jan Svankmajer animation CLICK HERE to see the animation.
This is another example of an animation style – to open children’s thinking and imagination. Jason pointed out how long this animation would have taken to make, given the number of details and the frames per second.
Penelope & Jason demonstrating silhouette
Introduction of shadow screen/silhouette
The session really took off. Three creative stations, with all sorts of action going on. (For more detail about each of the sessions, please see artists' reflections below.)
Laura & Penelope - Silhouettes
Children observed how proximity to the light changes size, dimension and direction: observations of what the audience can see/what the audience perceives.
Penelope chopped up some cardboard into a vague wing and beak shape and first the artists figured out how it worked, and then the children too had a play. Penelope mocked up a monster puppet and also used two semicircles of cardboard, for the class to see and play with.
Call worked with Lincoln on sound from the first class, and he was already across I-movie. Call to fill in content. They spent the session discussing sound, and Call is super excited to have Lincoln on board.
Jason animation puppet design
Jason worked with the design team on animation puppet design, working through the principles of jointing, and also the aesthetic – how they were going to collage the puppets from the drawings.
We began the session with a discussion of types of shots that are used in film; close up, long shot/ wide shot, birds eye view, mid shot, extreme close up, POV. Penelope then discussed film and camera language to create a shared language before storyboarding animation.
After this, we started storyboarding for the animation. Penelope steered the story part, while Jason did the drawing. The kids started to get fidgety, clearly it was a drag - this is as far as we got.
Wide Shot: A polluted Colac Lake. The pelican comes into land on the lake.
Mid-shot: Pelican surrounded by plastic bags on the lake (tummy rumbles through sound)
Close-up: Pelican has a plastic bag in its beak as it sits on the water.
ACTION: The pelican lifts up off the lake in search of more food.
Laura took them outside for the last 10 minutes for a game “Bibbety, Bobbety, Boo” – a game of physical game of concentration and collaboration.
Teachers reflected that the time of day (last session) was not great for something that demanded so much seated concentration, but we are thinking that maybe we (the artists) need to create storyboard. Timewise, this might have to be the case, as we have puppets to construct even before the animation can start to be filmed (and just over one month before presentation day!).
Reflection run by Laura: What we have done today - What was unexpected?
· see a bed sheet silhouette sheet set up – and being able to work with it.
· be a dancing monster with Penelope today.
· have a big piece of paper on the board (for storyboarding)
What was challenging about the storyboarding session (Tuesday afternoons everyone is tired)
What can we do then, to help with ideas for Tuesday afternoons?
Play a short game to start the afternoon session.
Kids came up with a bunch of games they could play.
What can help you with your energy focus and learn better on Tuesday afternoons?
· Have a good lunch before class.
· Don’t go crazy at break time so you have more energy.
· Take accountability for our impact on the session (creative process)
We decided to make a storyboarding team, broken into two parts:
Narrative – with Penelope (6 kids)
Drawing – with Jason, Billy is Jason’s AD in animation and will assist between narrative and storyboarding.
I was concerned about this week as I felt that we had skipped a beat in our progression and that we needed to storyboard before anything else. But, storyboarding can be the hard graft of animation, boring for kids, and Jason needed the time to get the design team working.
Over the weekend I spent a day, including a couple of hours working through things with Jason, on the drafting of the storyboard outline in the hope that this might suffice for the storyboarding. Alas, no - storyboard we must. We have come up with a plan, after discussion with the kids, where we will storyboard with them. It's an unconventional way to animate: you need a complete storyboard to know what to design - but we are going to design from the storyboard as it evolves - which is means there's no looking back...
It was great seeing all the teams working concurrently for the first time, and the project has hit the development phase solidly. Looking forward to next week as I reckon it's ramping up, and on time, with only a bit of white-knuckledness going on...
Our theatre making sessions throughout the past two days involved establishing a shared understanding of silhouettes and how we will create story and meaning from physical bodies and movement. Over the past several weeks the students have become comfortable creating tableaux works both individually and in small groups to tell stories. We’ve then started building in small movements or sound effects. With this tableaux work as their framework this week we moved onto understanding silhouettes. Initially, it took a little bit of time for them to grasp that tableaux are in 3D, however, silhouettes would be made by our bodies and then cast onto a 2D surface. We spent time problem solving how to shift our bodies to create an image that would be clear when cast onto a 2D surface by working in small groups to physicalise different parts of the narrative and it was really pleasing to see just how far the students have come in their ability to collaborate and problem solve as a group. Experimenting for the first time with silhouette today was energising and enlightening. Here are some of the things the students discovered from our play:
⁃ Standing closer to the source light makes the silhouette appear larger
⁃ Standing closer to the screen (further away from the source light) makes the silhouette appear smaller
⁃ These two things enable us to play with scale
⁃ Standing or walking side on to the screen gives the audience a profile silhouette
⁃ Slow motion movements are often more clear to an audience
⁃ We can “appear” from down below by crouching down outside of the reach of the light
⁃ Several people can create one creature by using depth, we can give one person 6 arms
⁃ We can use cardboard to create costumes/ puppets like the beak of a bird or wings
⁃ Creating silhouettes requires teamwork
I had had a lot of doubts about how to begin this week, still being unsure exactly what was required to be made for the story and how we would storyboard the animation. Penelope and I had had lengthy discussions over the weekend to develop a game plan. This morning was spent setting up the screen for silhouette work. I used a couple of push up stands and some plumbing bits and a pole to create a makeshift screen.
For stop motion table, I was unable to make suitable lighting stands, but had found a solution to attach the camera stands to the table itself. Once the children were sorted into their groups, I started to work with the design team. We focused on drawing a rosella from photos that were displayed on the monitor. I told the children to not think of it as a drawing exercise but more as a sketching, designing exercise where we explored line and shape and colour. I also asked them to focus on details and to work at getting the important features correctly such as the beak and the proportions of the body. I did this with both groups. I had to go back to sketching because a few children had not done any of the puppetry making work we had done earlier. Though I discovered one child has done some animation work and is developing a graphic novel with a friend.
This morning I spent time finishing and setting up the stop motion table, making sure everything was working as after the first session I was going to introduce the children to the animation system. During the break I found some time to do a short 41 frame stop motion animation with my rosella puppet and the flying fox puppet. CLICK HERE to see the video. I was then able to show the children the difference in frame rate first looking at 5 frames per second then 10 then 30 and then at one frame per second. I think we will film the animation on 10 frames per second which will give us a somewhat jerky motion but still be suitable. After the demonstration, I worked with the two design groups to turn their designs into puppets. Some children still have difficulty with this task as they cannot separate the drawing aspect from the puppet making aspect. I demonstrated on the whiteboard how to break the puppet into pieces:
I also showed how to create joins that were smooth and integrated and would look natural when operated. We kept working on the rosella and I think it would be a good idea to include all the children's work at some point in the animation but I think that I should construct the main puppets (and demonstrate this to the design group so they can learn), as these central puppets need to be robust enough to withstand handling across multiple weeks and the hands of the whole year 5 cohort.
his week was the beginning of the development phase of the project. The kids had been split into their production groups/roles, which meant that the sessions would be split between working with the cohort as a whole and working with the groups separately. I have 6 students in my Sound Design team which is a good, manageable number. Our first session together, we did a mix of building demo soundscapes for scenes from the story (we focussed on scene 1 and scene 7), as well as generating sound offers for the performance group, who were experimenting with silhouette work. Doing this, I was able to gauge the students comfortability with sound design and build my approach accordingly.
Thankfully, the students have been creating podcasts for their DDT class, so they have begun learning how to capture recordings, as well use basic Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) like Soundtrap. Two of the students told me of how they had been using GarageBand to create electronic music from loops, which is great, as I work in Logic Pro which is a step up from GarageBand, but means they’ll be familiar with the layout of the program. They’ve also got a pretty strong ability to identify and describe the textures of the different field recordings/SFX we looked at, especially one student who was able to pin point specific qualities and sounds in the recordings he liked or felt were wrong. All in all, I’m excited to begin the sound work with this team. I think the kids are going to create something truly great. My only minor concern is that there is a lot of interest within the team with composition, and less so on building atmosphere/SFX tracks. I totally understand this, creating music/composition tracks for work is far more creatively engaging than soundscape work. But I believe that approached the right way, and when the performance and the animation are in more complete stages, that excitement will come!
