Jon Harrison filming the Model Village workshop at The Glamorgan Archives.

On 9th June 2016 CAER Heritage Project lead artist Paul Evans and film maker Jon Harrison led the first of two Model Village creative workshops at The Glamorgan Archives with students from Michaelston Community School. This was the first stage in the creation of The Model Village film for the Connected Communities Utopia Festival at Somerset House

Featuring as part of a intensive, full day of activities within the archives entitled Past Detectives, the Model Village workshop was also designed to draw connections between research into Welsh Garden Villages with Cardiff University researcher Dr Stephanie Ward and the CAER Heritage Project Dusty Forge WW1 project with Dan Jewson.

After a brief collaborative drawing exercise the young people developed their own individual cartoon characters – inhabitants for the Ely Garden Village – and worked on scripts for their characters. These characters were then scanned into iPads and imported into a user-friendly app that allowed them to create short animation sequences. Photographs from the Ely estate were used as backgrounds or scenery for these sequences.

Characters designed by the young people are scanned into iPads to help create animation sequences.

The young people then carefully rehearsed their scripts and recorded their films/animation sequences, making the characters move in rhythm with their words.

Working in pairs, the young people record and review their animation sequences.

Selected animation sequences from this workshop will be featured in The Model Village film, along with an interview with Dr Stephanie Ward made at the Glamorgan Archive, and film sequences from the Ely estate made by local film maker Viv Thomas and Jon Harrison.

You can check out the finished film HERE.