Established within the framework of the project “Mother and Her Child”, the family club continued its monthly meetings. On Saturday, February 18, 2017, 8 families, gathered again at the educational centre of the Green Cross Belarus Non-governmental Organization. The participants were represented mostly by mothers and children (23 people in total) in order to try to create a hand-drawn story.

The training on the topic of slide films was inspired by the Conference of Artists-Teachers which was held at the beginning of February. Within its framework, results of the International Contest of Animated Films and Slidefilms were discussed. Members of the jury board highlighted that a slidefilm was an interesting form both for the creator and a viewer. That was why Anna Vygonnaya, the creative head of the club, chose that topic to try to create own film as well as to talk about animation and a process of creating cartoons.

As usual, the lesson consisted of a theoretical and a practical parts. The most interesting thing for everyone, of course, was to try to create something of their own. However, Anna Albertovna suggested to start with watching a slidefilm “Bird, Crow and Fox” (in Russian) which participated in the contest. The slidefilm was created by children from the studio “Raduga” (“Rainbow”) of MBU DO “Children's Art School” (Zelenogorsk, Russia). Basing on that example, the club’s members understood what a slidefilm is, what a shot consists of, what you need to pay attention to when creating it. Then, independent work followed up the previous stage. Anna Vygonnaya proposed to create a slidefilm on the fairytale “The Teapot” by Hans Christian Andersen. The process began with reading the whole fairytale, then the participants discussed its characters: what they could be, how they could be drawn, then each character got its key text (Anna Albertovna selected beforehand key phrases from the fairytale, which became the script of the slidefilm). The process of distributing texts also was conducted in a game form - on the principle of “forfeits”: one of the children blindly pulled out the text, and another child called a person who got it. After receiving the texts, the participants started drawing. Everyone worked only on one shot trying to illustrate expressively his or her own parts of the script. When all shots were drawn, they were glued to the texts and hung on the board sequentially, so that everyone could see each other's work which turned into a common slidefilm, as a result. Anna Albertovna promised that she would digitize all the shots and combine them into one file so that the whole family could watch the slidefilm on screens, TVs or monitors.

It should be mentioned that some participants worked so quickly that they managed to draw all the shots and make the whole slidefilm (in Russian) by themselves during the lesson.

After lunch, the time came for cartoons. Anna Albertovna showed and commented on the best works that had participated in the contest of 2017, and then talked about the history of animation with those who wanted (of course, adult members of the club were the people who wanted to listen to the history). The children went outside to continue creating. A snowman was made by joint efforts, and it looked “almost alive”, as one of the mothers said.

The end of the day was delicious and heartwarming – the Efimovs family treated everyone to homemade cakes.

The participants were very impressed by acquired knowledge and results. Many participants thought about continuing working on slidefilms at home: they discussed what kind of fairytales they would like to cinematize, who would work on the script and who was going to draw. Perhaps, this hobby will be the beginning of a new way for somebody – a way to animation.

See photos

The next lesson is planned for spring. You will be able to learn about its topic and date by visiting our web-site soon.