Impact Arts

Week 3 is complete – the groups are now in to week 4 and finalising everything for their big showcase on Thursday 30^thJuly!

Last week the Digital group were keen to come together and work on something as a group. They learnt how to do stop motion animation and began telling the story of the ‘green ball’. They each made a small animation of what the green ball was getting up to – it had quite the journey! You can see its premiere at the upcoming showcase!

They also learnt how to draw with chalk pastels and continued with their daily drawing challenges. Drawing images inspired by their favourite musicians, favourite characters, horror and something they love.

The older Digital group had another really positive week where they focused on their Showcase plans and let the yp explore their own ideas and make films. The stand out technique was stop motion animation and individually, the yp took activities they had looked at and ran with it. It almost became a self-directed week for the young people where they took responsibility and spent the week working. The films being made are varied and exciting ranging from personal coming out stories, a day in the life films and a lot of favourite food related films. Really exciting place to be in and we are looking forward to the films on being played at the showcase.

The Music groups did a lot of work with the program ‘BandLab’ in week 3, and experimented with making tunes together over zoom. This took the form of tutor, Hugh taking instruction from the young people about what to use instrument wise, note choices and general musical instructions. This yielded some pretty fun results, ranging from a slick detective then to a very bizarre Beyoncé-style song!

They also made some keyboard masterpieces using colours, where everyone drew 8 colours on a keyboard and Tutor, Beth turned them into small melodies on the keyboard. These melodies are going to be used in the Showcase on Thursday!

For the Visual group it has all been about scale; really small characters and ridiculously large eyes! They gave everyday things like windows, bushes and tennis rackets identity by adding giant handmade googley eyes. They created tiny characters who can interact with the world from a brand new perspective.

The 16-19 year old Visual group are going from strength to strength, and spent time playing with ink and paint, transforming work into a collage and then applying their skills to making a zine. They also have some ongoing personal projects that are slowly coming into fruition and which we can’t wait to see!

The Performance group for 14-15 year olds had the opportunity last week to appear on a radio programme, hosted by a young person around the same age as the participant’s. Two young people from the group wrote pieces for the radio show, showing fantastic resilience and confidence in sharing their work and in answering the questions asked very openly and maturely. They displayed and said how much they felt they had grown in confidence – which is a joy to hear!

Their appearance will be aired on Pulse on Air on Wed 29^th July, between 4-5pm – tune in.

The older Performance group have also had a busy week, where they started by revisiting work that they have completed over the last two weeks. Polishing the amazing material the young people have worked on, putting different ideas together, working on delivery, sharing feedback and beautiful thoughts. Tutor Sofia said; “They are such a positive group of creative young people they never stop impressing me!”

It is incredible to see how the young people’s confidence has grown within the last two weeks. Even though some of them still find it quite overwhelming for most of them they are very happy to read their work to the group and they have all pointed out multiple times that they find it useful even when the material they are sharing is not always finalised.

They also worked on writing letters to their future self which is where they based the video that they will be sharing in the showcase. (not long to go!!) The work that the young people created was once again incredible. When some of them struggled to write they reached out to their peers for support and advice which is great to hear. The group have managed to create a community of supportive young people even with virtual workshops. The final results of the letters were fun, honest, emotional, smart, and personal.

Wow!! Another exciting and busy week for all the teams. The weeks are flying in and the work coming from the groups just keeps getting better and better. Over the past 3 weeks over 100 young people from across Scotland have joined together digitally to create work on themes of Identity, Unity and Solidarity. Its only 2 days until they finish their final week and end with the spectacular showcase featuring music, animation, spoken word and visual art. You would be silly to miss it….join the teams on Thursday 30^th July at 2pm for the Showc