Although Christmas holidays started a week ago, our days have been way busier than usual.
The term ended with a performance with the band PULSE for the secondary school Christmas concert which took place at the Cultural Centre. The lack of stage planning resulted in an incredible amount of wasted time which made it impossible to do any sort of soundcheck and it has shown us how badly an event like this can be organised. Despite that, our band managed to wrap up the event with a groovy performance.
Then the week started with an extra activity we organised for some of the children we’ve been working with in the various projects. The main aim of the activity was to prepare the visual elements that will feature in the video-animation to be projected during our February production. As the theme for this show will be music from all over the world, we decided to create a character for each country we’ve been learning the music from.
Obviously there was a lot of preparation to be done beforehand: getting all the materials, drawing the models for the characters, researching about the traditional costumes of each country, printing out the faces for all the characters and so on.
Following that, we spent two afternoons with the children cutting the models out, dressing them up with coloured cardboard, adding all the necessary accessories and finally adding the faces to each one of the characters.
The third afternoon was focused on brainstorming with the kids about the narrative for the show. The starting point was "a Montserratian girl who decides to travel the world". From there we wanted to get the group to brainstorm about the reasons why she decided to do that, the means she could use to go from one place to the other and the incidents that could happen during her journey. Endless ideas came up, we’ll see how they’ll get together for the production!
Meanwhile, here are some photos and a video to give you a flavour of the handcrafting process!
