From fairytales to digital stories

In the context of a 6-week educational activity, the 6th-grade children of the 1^st Primary School of Kos had the opportunity to experience the filmmaking process through collaborative games, experiential activities, and artistic creation.

Our initial goal was to create an animated short film inspired in Eugene Trivizas’s fairytale ''The Magic Pillows'', using stop-motion techniques. The activity included adapting the fairytale into a film script and creating a digital story out of it; the end product of this process was the film ''Poppy Red as a Flame'', which run in the Competition section of the 20th Olympia International Film Festival for Children and Youth and won an award in the ‘Cinema Posters’ section of the 8th International Short Film Competition for Pupils. The experience of retelling the fairytale’s story and recreating the characters for the film’s sake gave birth to the idea of a theatrical adaptation. The theatre play premiered at the opening of the 3rd Theatre Festival for Pupils at the Roman Conservatory in Kos during the last quarter of the school year.

Along with the film production activity, a visit to the ''Zias Natural Park'' was held in the framework of the environmental programme ''Stories of the Forest''. Our aim for this trip was to introduce pupils to documentary filmmaking as a film genre and to make a short documentary film using cut-out animation technique elements as well as live narrations by the children in the classroom. The audio-visual material for the film was a combination of documentation shots of elements from the park’s habitat and other film shots. 

You can watch the film here.

• 24 pupils from the 6^th grade participated in this activity.