We joined the “Niños en Acción” workshops organized by the Guanajuato International Film Festival 2022. We were invited to collaborate with a workshop for children to encourage their creativity and explore the process for crafting 2D characters.
Our mission was to create an animated short film collectively. Teaching the bases for the development of short stories and finally edit a movie inspired in the theme “the connection of children with their families”. During our workshops the students experience the different roles of the crew and will initiate in film direction.
The workshop was divided 2 sessions of 4 hours each and the final piece will be around 3 and a half minutes. Our filmmaker experience was designed specially to provide kids with the opportunity to explore storytelling!
The first day of the workshop we dedicated the time to the conceptualization of characters and script writing!
To kickstart the session we hosted a screening of Cosmonaute 360 – Mission: RESCUE in fullscreen format projected at the ceiling of the beautiful classroom! This helped us show how film can be used as a tool to communicate our ideas and spread important meesages to our communitites.
With improvisation exercises the children learned to write scripts, generate concepts and illustrate their ideas.
To design characters we showed how creators can pick inspiration from the relationship with their family, brainstorming ideas to shape original creations. We asked the children key questions so that they themselves could give personality to the protagonists of the story.
Subsequently, the workshop participants showed how drawings and creations on paper can be captured with a mobile camera to be imported into a computer and process the graphics with digital programs, which will allow participants to understand the cut out technique (cutting out their characters and articulate puppets to give them movement).
The characters and backgrounds were created with digital collage using photographs and drawings made by the children.
The second day was dedicated to capturing sound, voices and talking about music!
With the help of workshop facilitator Sergio Ini Vazquez, the children’s voices were recorded using microphones and professional audio capture equipment.
Through post-production the voices of the actors were added to the characters to be easily animated with the cutout technique.
The workshop leaders Jesús Pérez Irigoyen and Ana Laura Cruz didactically showed their process to integrate all the elements. At the end the children voted for their favorite genres of music to complete the work. We are super happy with the result and preety sure kids will learn important skills they can use beyond just the classroom!
During the week, families had the opportunity to visit the EPICENTRO GIFF, a massive VR theater to enjoy the world premiere of Cosmonaute 360 – Mission: RESCUE in VR!
Cosmonaute 360 - Fulldome Shows 