Festive Focus – day 1

To kick off day one of Festive Focus, our Christmas holiday art course for 2016, Marysa Dowling introduced the children to her own photographic practice.

They looked at how different parts of our body can express emotion – i.e. the hands.

They looked at Marysa’s ongoing project, The Movement of an Object, in which Marysa has travelled the world, working with different groups of people, photographing them with the same blue bag.

They also looked at her recent project for Tate in which groups used house hold objects to transform themselves into sculptures, then were photographed.

Children then experimented with the blue bag project, taking it in turns to direct and photograph an image. 

How many things can you do with the same blue bag!

The children created some really interesting portraits.

…and were quite creative; playing with scale, angles and distance.

The bags became balls, hats, hair ties…boxing gloves, shoes and parachutes

We then went inside to experiment some more with pose and expression.

Using different expressions the children worked in pairs to create various moods.

They had emoji sheets to help them with ideas.

We went on to talk about using props to create a simple story that could be told through 4 simple shots.

We set some of our images to print while we got making our props.

We were photographing all the time!

A little festive sparkle began to creep in as some of us turned into Christmas trees!

We were having fun working together and solving problems.

Our characters and stories began to take shape.

We then moved to our makeshift photographic studio.

We took a look at the photographs we made earlier and thought about what made a good image and how it could be improved.

Low angles make us look powerful!

We started to compose our shots to tell our simple story.

We took it in turns to work with Marysa with the studio lights and cameras. We helped her direct the shots.

While we waited we rehearsed our shots and made a story board drawing.

We took photo’s of our props. Tomorrow we will look at how these shots came out, then work on making ourselves into sculptures and try some photo manipulation and collage.