WAKE UP TO SUSTAINABILIITY

Synopsis: Community Project aimed at college students to raise awareness of recycling and sustainability.

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WAKE UP TO SUSTAINABILITY started off as a student project for Creative Media Print & Journalism (year 2) students at South Essex College. The unit was Employability Skills which is designed to help the students develop skills such as teamwork, communication, problem solving, creativity, perseverance, time management and so on.

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The students were tasked with coming up with a suitable stop-motion idea that also worked as a Community Project. Through many discussions and presentations, the sustainability idea was formed. It was initially disjointed as it combined many ideas without a strong link. Eventually the 'classroom' theme was developed and links to the four elements, earth, wind, fire, and water.

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The plan was to produce a professional project and to submit this to the college marketing team with the hope of getting it published on the college media platforms.

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As we had a VERY limited budget we had to keep the cost down to an absolute minimum meaning found objects and cheap materials were all we had to work with. As the students had no experience in model making I decided to make some example props and back-up bits and pieces 'just in case'!

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Long story short(ish), the students were very slow with production of the sets as motivation and enthusiasm was pretty low, then the project deadline got brought forward suddenly by almost two months meaning everything had to be rushed to get finished, and each group had 90 minutes to set up and animate their sections! 

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Ultimately, as I had made numerous bits and pieces for this I decided it would be a complete waste if the project wasn't completed, so I made the decision to try to meet the same deadline as the students, using the same level of materials, and see if I could bring their idea to life myself.

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This would not have been a project I would have chosen to produce myself, but I couldn't let it just fall flat after all the time I had spent involved in it. So the result is what it is, but for the time and money, it's not too bad!

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NOTE: To be clear, none of this animation was produced by the students. The initial idea was developed in class, but all other aspects of this was produced entirely by myself.