Last week was the penultimate week of Culture Club and I can hardly believe it. Where has the time gone? After eight weeks of exploring an array of art, week nine of Culture Club brought it all together: the members chose their favourite week from the programme and began to interpret their theme (self-portraits, extinct animals, spoken word) into a stop-motion animation in which they are the lead character!

We started the sessions off by learning more about stop-motion animations. Michael and I shared videos that were created using stop frame, a form of animation that is captured one frame at time, with objects that are moved between frames so that when you play the sequence of images together, it creates the illusion of movement; we also showed some short films, examples on which the participants would base their own animations. Sarah also gave the members an example of her own stop frame animation in progress, featuring (drumroll please!) … everyone in Culture Club!

The main focus of the sessions was choosing what topic the members wanted to animate and how they needed to convey it. By chance, almost everyone chose a different week so nearly all of Culture Club’s themes are covered in the animation.

It was then onto creating the backgrounds for their animations; whether as mirrors to reflect self-portraits, a dreamscape and a jungle for endangered animals, or a market stall for fabrics, the members were focused on creating their backgrounds and characters for the animation and already knew what they wanted to create. 

It’s safe to say we couldn’t finish everything in this session, but Culture Club is dedicated as always to art and will bring not only their completed background but also their cast of characters to our final session where the animation can begin! But the concentration and progress were phenomenal, with characters and backgrounds already taking form.

As always, a lovely week with Culture Club and the start of an amazing finale to sum-up what has been an exciting and progressive journey that these ten weeks have taken us on. 

Blog post by Savhanha