Whether it's stewarding at a festival, writing for a magazine, or producing works of art, volunteering for creative projects is bound to get those juices flowing.

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Friday Nov 14, 2008

The Kids Are Revolting!

For this session I typed up the characters and manifesto points we then voted on the manifesto which looks like follows:

If young people ruled the world I would...

CREATE A DROP IN SCHOOL SYSTEM

MAKE ALL ADULTS TAKE PUBLIC TRANSPORT (TO HELP STOP DESTROYING THE PLANET)

CREATE A WIDER CHOICE IN ALL SCHOOL CANTEENS

LET MUSIC BE ALLOWED ON BUSES

MAKE YOUNG PEOPLE'S VOICES HEARD

Clearly some are more political and pertinent than others... but they should all make entertaining and informative vignettes.

After the young people had left we worked a bit later (til gone 9pm!) on finalising the script, writing a storyboard and making t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan created by the young people - 'Freedom not Boredom! We came up with some different names for the film. One I formulated was, 'The Kids are Revolting!' bit of a pun in there! This Saturday we begin the filming at the Tower... exciting stuff...

Posted by Rhiannon ( 12:00 AM )
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Tuesday Nov 11, 2008

Justice will be served

We finished watching the film 'Twelve Angry Men', in which they find the young man not guilty. It was a powerful ending, but I'm not sure now how much of our film will be based on this, though the theme is still youth justice, the location now is... the Tower of London! So we need to fit our story around that. I think I'm more excited about the location than the young people are! As my parents have never been much inclined towards the tourist trail, so I'm looking forward to rectifying this...

We began loosely working on an idea that the young people now rule the world and figuring out why this is and just what they are going to do with this new found power.... Unsurprisingly a lot desired the dramatic demise of unpopular teachers and less school time! But some more serious points made it through also.

We also worked on characters for the film, one of my favourites was Jade, who 'is a racer like Lewis Hamilton, likes to show off, has a pretty face and everyone hates her'! We then played a game called 'Agree – Disagree' whilst in character. This involved the reading out of statements, if your character agreed you stood at one end, if they disagreed at the other. We used points from the manifesto for this and contentious views like 'young people should be seen and not heard'. Then you were asked to justify your opinion in relation to the statement whilst staying in character. This game established what it is to be the character and to look at things from their perspective. Next week we will finalise the manifesto ideas with votes from the young people.

Posted by Rhiannon ( 1:12 PM )
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Monday Nov 03, 2008

Take One:Action!

I am now a veteran of any name game you care to mention, and have found they definitely work as ice breakers and of course to learn names, which I was rather rusty at… We also played games to discover favourite things that we have in common, and unsurprisingly pizza was a top choice..!

The young people in the group are enthusiastic and ready to learn, which is fantastic. Of the 10 that were supposed to turn up we got less than half, which is disappointing but apparently our group is the best attended of all the different volunteering groups including drama, photography and radio. I’m hoping that as the kids get more into it they’ll tell others and this will hopefully increase our numbers. In order to track the young people’s development, we asked them to mark on a chart their knowledge of film from ‘nothing’ to ‘a lot’, it will be great to watch the progression of this.

We then got the young people to go through different shots on the camera including a wide-shot, pan and close-up and when you might use different shots like these. They took to it very quickly, and were soon zooming up one another’s nostrils with aplomb…

To introduce the theme of the film, which will be youth justice, we got the group to watch extracts from ‘12 Angry Men’, a film about the criminal justice system in America. Victoria (one of the directors of the project) wasn’t sure how interested the young people would be in this, as it was a film from the 1950s in black and white. It follows 12 members of a jury as they deliberate over whether they can find a young man guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Along with the rest of the group I was desperate to know the conclusion but we were left on a cliff hanger – which I look forward to being resolved in the next session…

Posted by Rhiannon ( 12:00 PM )
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