Flora, fauna and folklore art project

Cruinniú na nÓg 2023 – the National Day of Creativity for children and young people takes place on Saturday 11th June, and is funded by Creative Ireland through Leitrim County Council. The model is similar to Culture Night except, in this case, events are held during the day, and are focused on providing children and young people with opportunities to explore creativity.

Flora, fauna and folklore art project with youth artist in residence Laura McMorrow will investigate language, nature and folklore through digital technology in the form of animation. The project will involve a series of workshops at The Dock Arts centre with 25 young people from Scoil Mhuire, National School.

Laura will start the project by presenting of her work, artistic practice, and examples of other eco artists work that inspires her and clips of animations to inspire them.
The young people will incorporate different languages in their stories which can be based on local stories or invented by the young people.
For example the Irish word such as squirrel translates directly as tree dog, Meirini na mban si, the Irish word for foxgloves translates as Banshee’s fingers and Jellyfish translates as seal snot.

The young people will work in small groups to discuss, draw a storyboard to plan out the story for their animations.
The process in creating a stop motion animation will involve using a cut paper technique textured and coloured paper to create collaged backdrops and characters for their animations. For the project, we will be using recycled materials like envelopes and wallpaper to create the textures for the animations and highlighting the importance’s of been environmental aware.

We will be using a simple and free app called Stop Motion Studio to take photographs and record the sound effects for the animations, The young people will learn how to use the app and how to bring their characters to life using movement and sound. This technique will also be beneficial for the teacher to use again after the project with young people.

The young people will be involved in all aspects of creating an animation from start to finish with guidance from Laura, making sure that the young peoples voices and creative opinions are taken in account during the project.
The animations will be screened for Cruinniu na nOg on Friday 9th June for a special screening for the school and over the weekend for family and local communities to view. After the weekend the animation will be available to view on The Dock website and YouTube channel for those that cannot make the screening days