Over a week-long online film-making residency in April 2021, the group of young people aged between 16 and 19 explored DIY film and music-making techniques to create work about the issues they care about.
Young artist Hunter created this stop motion animation film rooted in how queer people experienced lockdown.
Words and film by Hunter
I am an autistic, queer student artist. I love working with collage, film photography and makeup! I wanted to focus mainly on personal experience within this project and to create something other neurodiverse and/or queer youth could relate to with the pandemic experience.
First of all I would like to say how incredibly the team worked together and overcame the challenges of creating an exhibition piece over Zoom. Holly, Kate and James were amazing leaders providing extensive support and enthusiasm throughout the week. No stone was left unturned in regards to bringing out the best in all of us attending and helping us to nurture our creativity.
Seeing as this was an online residency there were a few challenges we had to overcome as a team. Communication was essential in this residency to make sure everyone was on the same page and had a clear understanding of each task. It can be pretty hard to communicate clearly over Zoom so we had a lot of clarifying to do with each task. Everyone took each other’s needs into consideration every day, making sure to give good feedback and encouraging each other to overcome these challenges.
Planning was made easier with the feedback from my peers and being able to voice my ideas and thoughts. Sharing new ideas each day over the course of the week was really important in the development of my project.
My stop motion film idea is rooted in how queer people experienced lockdown. I used collaging and a placard design to represent that while others separated to take care of themselves in the battle against Covid, queer people had to band together to protect themselves against society, the government, healthcare and abuse.
I personally wanted to develop my team working skills over the course of the week as well as creative skills in sound production and story boarding which I succeeded in with the help of the leaders. I learned the different angles to film from and different types of shots. We also had the opportunity to ask museum employees what they do within their roles as well as how they got to those positions.
On one of the days we had a workshop with a sound collage artist, Poppy Tibbetts which was very informative and really fun! I enjoyed getting to know the cultural history of sound collage.
Find out more about City as Studio, here.