DreamIt: Upskilling for the future
At the beginning of the year, a group of young people from Chopwell Youth Club started to imagine what their future might look like and then they brought those ideas to life.
Funded by the Postcode Lottery, DreamIt is the first of our longer-term projects, combining the two things we’re brilliant at, creativity and digital technology. The group has worked with four different artists to produce a short film featuring AI, animation and sound design, all underpinned by a story created by the young people.
Starting with writer Susan Mulholland, the girls created a story about a new app on their phones which would allow them to see their potential future. The next stage was to explore how the latest AI technology could allow them to see what this future would look like, working with film-maker Ronnie Johnston. Next animator and illustrator, Laura Crow, showed the group how to use animation software. Like the other artists, Laura has been impressed with how engaged the group have been, and the range of different techniques they’ve been willing to try:
“The group particularly enjoyed creating the Procreate animations, as they were able to be creative with this and also have a fun and relaxed time doing it in the workshops. Each member of the group was able to have a go at using after effects 1-1 with myself to put all their creations together. This meant the group was able to get some skills in Procreate and a little in After Effects.”
With these new skills, the girls then worked again with Ronnie Johnston to create an AI animated sequence to complete their film.
We’re not done yet! The girls then handed over the visual material to a different group from the Youth Club, whose brief was to design a suitable soundtrack and sound effects, under the expert guidance of Andy Ludbrook, a sound recordist, sound designer and musician.
“Ronnie and I spent some time with the group analysing the layers in a film soundtrack using examples from my previous work and also encouraged them to come up with their own examples of good soundtracks. We listened to the ways music conveys different atmospheres and emotions. The group were then introduced to Cubasis 3 [music creation software] on the iPad, and after familiarisation with the program they set about creating pieces of music for each of the scenes.”
Andy was impressed with the group’s concentration and creativity:
“Although they only had a few hours in total to do this, with a lot of concentration, some very original cinematic music cues and drones were made from the internal instruments and sounds recorded into Cubasis. We then moved on to searching through an online sound effects library, each of them finding effects to go with objects in different scenes. This process is very long even for experienced dubbing editors, but they still came up with good effects and atmospheres to put into the final mix.”
The finished film was launched this week at a special screening for friends and family; we’ll be sharing it, and a behind the scenes film, very soon.
The future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades!