Saturday Shadow Puppet Workshop

As a student leader of Saturday Art Club sessions (a national organisation to help young people learn more about the different creative careers), I am sometimes asked to help lead specialist taster sessions. This week we set up a miniature fair, in which the Sat Clubbers could sample different crafts and skills in 10 minute sessions and then choose a speciality to learn more about in an afternoon session. My session was called The Papercut Theatre and it involved creating your own papercut backgrounds and characters and then filming the resultant story.

In the ten minute taster session I got the students to make one shadow puppet each, and we got everything from owls to octopi. Then in the afternoon session I had a group of 4 students making 2 films. One was called Bob the (baby) Owl, in which Bob falls from his nest but is rescued by Mummy Owl. The other was set in a circus and showed jugglers, unicyclists and ballerinas performing before the circus bear escapes and attacks the audience and themselves. I was amazed at the competency involved in the shadow puppets they made and they really listened when I was explaining about how to us the light source and strength of the shadows to their advantage.