Intercultural Animation & Storytelling Workshops

Terra Nova Productions has just finished piloting our first intercultural workshops on storytelling and animation. These workshops are part of our foundation work for our up-coming projects, All At Once I Saw A Crowd and The Ulster Kama Sutra. 

Participants from across Belfast worked in English, Cantonese, Polish and Mandarin, using drawing, cartoons, story boarding, home-made figurines and sets to create scenes.  They learned how to create and structure narrative, and had an opportunity to create their own stop motion short scenes.  The artists and workshop leaders on the project were Chen Ko, Andrea Montgomery, Christopher Murphy & Erika Reid.

The workshops were supported by Belfast City Council's Good Relations Unit, and partners included Barnardos Northern Ireland, Edmund Rice College and the Chinese Wellfare Association. The work took place throughout 2010 & spring 2011.

Artistic Director Andrea Montgomery talks about the pilot workshops in this short film (footage & questions by Chen Ko):

Several groups of young people worked on animations inspired by the science themes in our up coming environmental science based production, All At Once I Saw A Crowd.  They worked on scenes based on reduced or damaged carrying capacity in closed environments inhabited by humans: 15th century Greenland, and 17th century Tikopia.

Polish mums created a scene of winning the lottery and running away for a holiday during the workshop with Barnardos Belfast.

Again the theme of airplane travel came up in our Mandarin speaking mothers' workshop, with this short animation showing the moment of arrival in a new country.