The nights are growing darker and there’s a chill in the air. Halloween is almost upon us! To celebrate the season, I have some scarily good workshops for your school or club to enjoy.
Zombie Make-up Effects
Transform into a gory zombie using professional special effects make-up techniques.
£150 for up to 20 people*
Apparition – Drawn Animation
Work as a group to make shape-shifting ghosts and ghouls materialise using hand drawn animation techniques.
£150 for up to 10 people*
Haunted House – Paper Cut Out Animation
Use paper animation techniques to create a haunted house filled with things that go bump in the night.
£150 for up to 10 people*
Each workshop is a 3 hour session with all materials and equipment provided.
Workshops are suitable for all ages and abilities.
Email contact@evanwilkinson.co.uk to book now. Availability is limited so book early to avoid disappointment.
*Workshops are charged at £150 within the local Brighton area. Work outside of the Brighton area may necessitate further charges.
Evan Wilkinson, Community Filmmaker
Evan is a local filmmaker with over 15 years of experience in delivering workshops and providing industry training. He is currently an industry tutor at the Brighton Digital Media Academy.
During the summer of 2012 I was working on an animation project for the Brighton Photo Biennial, working in partnership with Photoworks, Brighton & Hove City Library Services and the Youth Arts Project, part of Brighton & Hove City Council’s Youth Service. The brief was to provide a series of animation workshops for young people exploring the Biennial’s theme of the Politics of Space and to create digital stories for an exhibition at Jubilee Library. The project is called Tales of the City.
As an animator I am drawn to methods that are comparably low-tech by today’s standards. I’m fascinated by antiquities such as Zoetropes and Magic Lanterns and I love the organic nature of traditional drawn animation and stop motion puppetry. I think it’s important to be hands on and to have a physical connection with your work. Animation is a method of performance because your work is the result of your own personality. Your characters are born of you. The relationship between the animator and the world that they create is one that is very personal.
I was eager to introduce the young people to as many different animation techniques as possible so as to really allow them to experiment. Experimentation is what animation is all about. It was through experimentation that moving image was born and that experimentation allows the medium to evolve constantly. I wanted to include some examples of this evolution in my work for this project.
I started with simple optical illusions based around the concept of persistence of vision – thaumatropes, zoetropes and flick books. It was important to me to begin by demonstrating how animation can be created without the use of cameras and computers, especially when working with young people who may not have access to such equipment at home.
For me, the digital process is necessary to my work, but secondary to the drawings, puppets and sets that I create. The computer is there as a capture device and to refine the work in post-production but what an animator can produce with their own hands is the true magic of the medium.
The young people began by making thaumatropes – optical toys that create an illusion by combining two images on either side of a disk when it is spun quickly. I wanted to start with something small and simple that would produce an instantaneous result. Animation can be so time consuming and requires such patience that it can be off-putting for beginners and the real joy for someone having a go for the first time is to see their creation come to life in front of them. As important as it is for people to understand animation methods and techniques, it is vital for them to experience that little bit of magic for the first time.
As well as an understanding of techniques, it was important to also build an understanding of the Biennial’s theme into the work. The Politics of Space is a difficult concept to engage with and the challenge was to distil it into something that would engage young people and lend itself to creative work. The key was to make it relevant to them, to allow them to engage with the ideas and relate them to their own experiences. I decided to focus on local identity and the relationship that the young people had with their environment, using this to introduce them to the underlying politics within their space.
To begin with, we explored Brighton’s identity through discussion and drawings, creating a palette of Brighton iconography to draw into our animations. The young people created imagery that typified Brighton and then translated it into a beautiful hand drawn animation.
We then explored particular spaces on a closer level, discussing where the young people felt safe and welcome, where they liked to hang out and what places they avoided. It was interesting to explore Brighton from their perspective and to examine the different atmosphere and personality that you will find in different areas around the city. I wanted to make the young people aware of the politics of space by getting them to consider the rules and social norms they observe around the city and how these can change or influence their behaviour differently in different places.
After discussing Brighton’s various neighbourhoods I asked the young people to choose one space which they had all been to and that they thought had potential to explore through animation. The young people selected Brighton Marina, which is close to where a number of them live.
Brighton Marina is an interesting example of the politics of space at work in our local community. By its very location it is separate from the city with only one main route in and out by car and minimal pedestrian access, making it an almost self contained space. There is the obvious geographical divide between land and water. The residential part of the Marina is gated, restricting access to only those that live there, creating a landscape of barriers and exclusion. There is also a social divide as the expensive boats of the Marina are symbols of a lifestyle that only few can afford and yet its location, just south of Whitehawk means that some of the city’s least affluent residents use it as their nearest source of leisure.
The young people explored maps and aerial photos to create a bird’s eye view of Brighton Marina, which they animated using paper cut out techniques. We started by creating our set and then breaking it down into moving elements such as the sea, cars, buses and boats. All of these were then combined to create a day in the life of Brighton Marina.
The young people then discussed their own relationships with the Marina – how they get there, what they do when they’re there and where they do and don’t go. These experiences were recorded as voice over, so that each member of the group could tell their own story. Finally, each member of the group made a paper cut-out version of themselves to animate their part of the story.
Every Saturday throughout the Biennial, the young people shared what they learnt through drop in animation workshops or children aged 5-11 at Jubilee and Whitehawk Libraries.
All of the work created for this project was exhibited in the Young People’s space at Jubilee Library during the Photo Biennial.
About the Author:
Evan Wilkinson is a Community Filmmaker based in Brighton. As well as producing videos and community film projects, Evan teaches workshops in filmmaking, script development and animation. For more information please visit: http://evanwilkinson.co.uk
This was a short film made by children from Years 3 and 4 at Meon Junior School in Portsmouth. It was part of a Creative Partnerships project focused on literacy. The group had already worked with another company to devise a fairytale-like story. I was tasked with showing the children how to turn that story into an animation through a series of workshops.
We began by breaking the story into scenes and discussing how scenes are laid out in a script. It was not long before we had adapted the group’s story into a script to use whilst shooting. Following this, we explored shot language and the group learned about how to use master shots, close-ups and cut-aways to tell their story visually. Armed with this knowledge the group were able to create a shot list and a storyboard for their animation.
The next thing the group had to tackle was character design and so we discussed what the characters should look like and what physical attributes we could give them to enhance their personalities. Based on this list of qualities and descriptions the class drew their ideas for each character and then voted for their favourites to make the final decisions.
Once we knew what the characters looked like we turned our attention to the animation’s sets and used a similar process to design the different environments of the story.
Once the design stage was complete, we moved onto construction. I led the group through a workshop on how to make articulated puppets for paper cut-out animation and then we assigned teams to start work on each of the characters and sets. This was a difficult job as the children had to take into account the ways in which each character needed to move as well as making sure we had removable features for every facial expression required for each of the characters.
We also had to create versions of the puppets in different sizes, such as enlarged heads and facial features for close-ups. Added to all of this was the challenge of keeping every element of the animation in proportion so that it would work when we put it all together.
With all of our elements prepared, we were able to start animating the film. The group had a workshop to introduce them to animation techniques at the start of the project, so they would be familiar with the software and the process. Shooting out of sequence, the classes were split into small animation teams each with a few shots to complete. We only had two days in which to shoot the film. Everyone involved in the project also got to record narration and sound effects for the film, which were then combined when the film was edited.
This is one of the youngest age groups that I have worked with and so I was extremely impressed by the quality of their work within such a limited timeframe. The project was delivered and completed in the space of six weeks, with only a day of workshops each week for each class.
T.A.N.K.S was one of the films made by young people through the Oak Grove Film Project, a peer mentoring and integration project that brought mainstream young people and young people with special needs together to make short films. Workshops explored genre, technical filmmaking skills, script writing and development, casting, stage fighting, props making, acting techniques and direction.
In the first year of the project the young people made a science fiction film, an outcome decided by the project organisers. For the project’s second year I wanted the young people to have more ownership of what they made, so I wanted them to select the genre themselves. In order to present the group with their options I ran a series of workshops on genre looking in particular at genres that were easy to define stylistically and visually such as Horror, Western, Thriller, Action and Adventure. In each workshop I would show film clips as examples in order to prompt the group to pick out the defining elements or ingredients of each genre. We looked at the visual style, basic story structure and archetypal characters within each genre and explored the associations that the group had with each type of film. The group then voted for the genre that they would like to work in, choosing to make an Action movie.
With the genre selected, we then began to explore Action in more depth looking at films like Die Hard, Hot Fuzz and Kung Fu Hustle. The group explored a workshop on the action hero, looking at the typical personality traits of an action hero, their journey to becoming a hero through the course of the story and their relationship to other characters such as a sidekick, a love interest (who finds herself in danger) and an authority figure who challenges the hero’s methods.
With our understanding of the action hero complete, I then led a workshop that looked at the villain’s role within the genre and the ways in which the villain can be compared and contrasted with the hero. We also looked at his henchmen and cronies.
To begin generating ideas for our film, I ran a workshop in high concept movies – films with a simple premise that can be explained in one sentence. The group were asked to identify a number of films from their high concept descriptions and then began creating and pitching their own high concept premises for the film. The aim was to establish a threat for our hero to fight against as this would provide the basis of our plot. We played around with a lot of ideas, established which concepts were the most popular choices and then began to swap and combine elements until we had a story idea that everyone agreed on. The threat was an evil headmaster with a brainwashed army of school children – Totally Awesome Ninja Kids – giving us our title, TANKS.
With our characters identified and a premise on which to build our plot, I then led the group in exploring the hero’s journey more closely and used story structure, along with all of the genre ingredients we’d already listed, to map out a blueprint for a typical action film plot. This blueprint followed a recognizable three-act structure that the group were able to apply to a number of action movies that they were familiar with. This plan outlined roughly ten scenes in which our hero notices something suspicious, investigates, identifies the villain and meets a series of obstacles before finally defeating the enemy. We were then able to slot our story ideas and ingredients into the blueprint and soon had a full story outline for the writers to work with.
The group split into two working groups for the screenwriting process with a group of writers discussing ideas and drafting scenes while a group of actors improvised scenes and characters. Each week the two groups would feed each other ideas with the writers suggesting scenes or characters for the group to improvise and the actors performing them. I felt that this was a good way for those who didn’t want to write to still feed their ideas into the script and influence the story. Improvisation can be really useful to help writers come up with new ideas or fill in gaps in the story that they might be struggling with.
Castings were filmed and done in groups so that people could also try out for crew roles and get in some practise with the kit.
The film needed to be high energy. Obviously car chases weren’t possible and so our chases had to be on foot. We also had a stage fighting workshop in order to learn safe fighting techniques for the film and devise our onscreen clashes. This was a particularly fun day.
We shot the film over a few weekends at The Rosie and around Oak Grove College. The film was entered into the Oak Grove Community Film Festival and was nominated for ‘Best Drama.’
I’ve been writing and making films since childhood. I remember the first time my sister and I got our hands on a friend’s camcorder. We created simple in-camera tricks such as making people disappear and reappear and turn into different objects. It was like performing a magic trick. Inspired by Sesame Street and the Adam and Joe show, my childhood experiments in video progressed to using stuffed animals and toys to recreate dramas and tell stories of my own. In my teenage years, like a typical adolescent, mortality became a fascination for me. I started making campy fake-blood-soaked horror shorts with friends, running around the South Downs screaming, with rusty shears and other improvised weapons.
I can assure you that all of these early films were terrible, but those elements are still present in my work today. I am drawn to the illusion of cinema and the opportunity to create effects. As an animator I enjoy giving life to puppets, toys and inanimate objects, essentially using the same stop/start technique that my sister and I employed to make ourselves disappear from the frame as children. I still love creating horror effects and channel this into experiments with special effects make-up. Horror has taught me how to create tension and suspense, which was a great entry point to understanding how to provoke a range of emotions in an audience.
Leading workshops was something that evolved quite organically for me. I started learning about production and script writing when I joined my local youth theatre. I originally had ambitions to act, but soon became far more enchanted with the world backstage than on it. I got involved in making props and costumes. I started devising and writing material. Then, around age 14, I tried my hand at leading workshops and this is when I was able to get my hands on video cameras again. At first we produced in-camera edited films but then when the group acquired a laptop I started learning how to edit and how to shoot for the edit. I went on to study film, media and photography academically, but it was through the theatre group that my education began, and years later, where I got my first paid work as a workshop leader.
Being part of a community group was not only a huge support to me throughout my childhood but also a creative playground where I was able to learn, collaborate and develop throughout my formative years. Perhaps this is why I try to keep community at the heart of what I do. I believe that film and animation can provide all kinds of people with a creative and positive outlet, to help them develop their own voice in the same way that I did. As such, I enjoy working with different communities and on projects that have a social benefit.
Coming from a background of low budget theatre and filmmaking, I am used to getting my hands dirty on set and occupying several roles at the same time. This hands-on attitude has given me the opportunity to learn about the process of filmmaking from a variety of different perspectives within development, production and post-production. It has also enabled me to experiment with production design, props and puppet-making, special effects makeup and set building.
I am an avid film fan who loves to watch, make and talk about films. I’m a big fan of innovative writers and directors like Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman. I have a passion for film history and silent cinema. I love science fiction, monster movies, fantasy and horror films. I am definitely drawn to the dark side, so filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton are a big inspiration as well as animators like Jan Svankmajer, Jiri Trnka, and the late great Ray Harryhausen.
I love animation, especially when it gives me the opportunity to create strange characters. It takes a great deal of patience and attention to detail, but it’s those details that I love to get lost in, like how a character is going to move and perform or what they are going to sound like. Watching your animation come to life is like watching magic happen in front of your eyes. The first time you watch your work back, and see your characters move as if they have a life of their own, it’s incredible. It’s so much fun to introduce new people to animation, and see that same reaction in them.
I have a lot of ambitions – one of them being to build my own production company from the ground up. I’m just starting out on that journey, but I already feel I’ve achieved my most important goal of being able to do something that I love for a living. I am learning every day – about myself, about film and about running my own business. I plan to share these experiences through this blog and hopefully interest and entertain along the way. I’m always open to conversations and opinions, so feel free to comment, critique and join the discussion.
Evan Makes Films 