Workshops

Worlds Within

The ‘overview effect’ is defined as the cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts as soon as they see earth from space: they promptly realise our fragile blue globe must be protected by all of us, and that we bear a collective environmental responsibility.

Nina van Hartskamp was inspired by this overview effect. With Worlds Within, she created a similar kind of effect, but one that is very intimate and inclusive: an ‘in-view effect’ – a perspective that includes the notion of coexistence as a crucial part of life on earth.

With this work, she makes invisible worlds visible and draws attention to our essential companionship with microbes. To do so, she collected and cultivated the microbial life in the bedrooms of various people by exposing petri dishes to the air while they sleep. After incubating the cultures, they are photographed and presented as planets, worlds within the world.

These strange planets are totally different for each individual. Confronted with ‘their’ little planet, the participants are invited to think about the living worlds within and around them.

Animation Zone: SuperYou

Animatieplaats: SuperYou

Stop-motion animation is almost as old as film itself. It was one of the primary special effects before the arrival of digital animation. Over the years, many variations have evolved, but the basic idea remained the same: a series of stills with tiny changes in each frame, resulting in a fluid motion as full animation.

At the Animation Zone, professional animators teach children about the basic techniques of stop-motion animation. In these sessions, the children create and animate specially designed characters and objects. The hand-crafted scenes are recorded with a camera above the big green workspace and shown live on a screen. Afterwards, they can be viewed again at home.

This year’s Animation Zone is designed by Sioejeng Tsao, also known as SEEYOUSIOE. Her work consists of paintings and digital illustrations, forming a colourful exploration of different social aspects and her own queer and bi-cultural identity. She graduated in fashion styling at the Academy Artemis and now combines her illustrations with her activism around racism and feminism. Cinekid’s Animation Zone, developed over a decade ago by Michael van Eeden and others, has many different forms and is popular both in the Netherlands and abroad.

NINA VAN HARTSKAMP

THE NETHERLANDS | 2020 | 6+

SIEOJENG TSAO, CINEKID

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 | 6+

Another Cookie

Andere koek

Documentary maker Mirjam Marks and designer Rianne van Duin visited eighteen families at five asylum-seekers’ centres to cook a dish with the children in these centres that reminds them of home and their lives before their arrival in The Netherlands. The resulting stories and animated films were collected in Another Cookie, a cookbook with tastes and stories from all corners of the world: from Nigeria to Azerbaijan, from Eritrea to Pakistan and from Syria to Sri Lanka.

Mirjam Marks & Rianne Duin developed a workshop on the basis of this exceptional project, getting children to bake cookies together and talk to one another about the meaning of food and eating. Once their cookies are in the oven, the children get to work on their own stories about food: they make their own book page with a recipe, a dish with a personal story and an illustration. The children also create a story together in the form of a stop-motion animated film.

Bird’s Nest

Het Vogelnest

The bird population is declining throughout the country and we humans are part of the problem. During this workshop, the children are invited to put themselves in the shoes of urban birds. Using masks, wings and real bird movements, the participants transform into birds, and make an animated film with their own bird story. In this way, the children can think in a playful way about how humans and other beings influence one another. Bird’s Nest works with pixilation. This animation technique works like stop-motion, but with movements by live action actors as the major animator. The result is a surreal view of our real world.

Olivia d’Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist from India. Her work combines her fascination for ecology with human and animal rights. Her stories are a combination of fiction and documentary, and she works with video, animation, drawings and sculpture.

MIRJAM MARKS, RIANNE VAN DUIN

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 | 6+

FACTS

Advisor book recipes Jonah Freud Commissioned by ROSE Stories

OLIVIA D’CRUZ

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 | 6+

Body.scratch BYOR Build Your Own Robot

The founder of the Body.scratch Academy, Alvin Arthur, is a computer programmer and choreographer. Choreographers actually work in a similar way to programmers, by ordering blocks of information to create something. As a dancer, Alvin knows you can create something using movement; as a programmer he was frustrated by having to constantly sit. In Body.scratch, he brings these two worlds together: participants are challenged to learn to create while moving with their bodies, and to decipher the abstract aspect of code.

In this workshop, the participants match dance movements to pieces of code, and in so doing create a game. Body. scratch attempts to reinstate the cohesion between body and spirit by contributing to a society where people are more in contact with their own body while learning new skills. Body.scratch also helps them to explore their creative, motor, collaborative, social and cultural skills through programming and dance. The ways in which we make and use technology have a huge impact on the environment and on our everyday surroundings. We cannot escape our responsibilities when producing all this technology, and one way of recognizing them is by using sustainable resources and recycled materials. In our current climate crisis, teaching sustainability at a young age seems more important than ever.

This BYOR workshop is immersed in 21st-century skills. Its participants will learn the value of re-using materials and making use of sustainable energy in an active, playful way. They will build themselves a robot from waste materials and, while tinkering, learn about robotics, upcycling, and sustainable energy. They will build these self-designed robots from plastic and cardboard, and then program them by adding a programmable chip. The BYOR electronics – made up of a range of sensors, motors, lamps and buzzers, has been specially designed for children.

ALVIN ARTHUR

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 |

FACTS

Producer Body.scratch Academy

TEUN VAN ROESSEL

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 |

FACTS

Producer Build Your Own Robot Design Build Your Own Robot

The Hunt for a Miracle

The VR story The Miracle Basket by Abner Preis, which premières this year at Cinekid, is all about biodiversity, sustainability and the future, but also about a people rediscovering their traditions. Inspired by this story, participants in this workshop make use of the augmented reality app Weird Cuts, developed by Zach Lieberman and Molmol Kuo. Using this app, they create their own 3D collages with images depicting their own Miracle Basket. This allows the children to reflect through images on how they think our planet can be saved from natural disasters.

Their vision of the future of the planet is shared in an AR video. The Hunt for a Miracle was developed for Cinekid by visual and audio artist Zoe Reddy. In her work, she combines various tools and technologies to create interactive, educational experiences. She also likes to experiment with mixed media to create cheerful chaos.

mBot Robot Football

mBot Robot Voetbal

How do all the technologies we use every day make the connection between the physical and the digital worlds? One of the tools made for this – to quickly make connections between the physical and the digital world through tinkering – is Arduino. These microcontrollers are actually mini-computers, and were invented specially to quickly prototype devices and all kinds of inventions you think up yourself.

In this workshop, the children learn to program and code using the mBot robot, based on an Arduino microcontroller. The participants put a robot together themselves using a screwdriver, a set of instructions, the microcontroller and various cables. They also program the robot themselves using specially developed software, which teaches them the basic rules of code. Once their control module is finished, they can upload this to their mBot. At the end of the workshop, the children play a game of robot football.

ZOE REDDY, CINEKID

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 | 7+

FACTS

Commissioned by Cinekid

TECH4KIDS

THE NETHERLANDS | 2016 | 8+

Nova’s SoundLab

Participants in Nova’s Soundscape discover the power of sound in films. They design their own soundtrack for the opening film of Cinekid, Captain Nova, supervised by a music producer. They will be asked to create the sound of the year 2050 – the year in which Captain Nova has to save the Earth. How do they think the world will sound then? Participants work with foley – the means of recreating everyday sounds for use in films. Various sound-producing devices are available to the participants to use in their own recordings. They can also make use of all kinds of (musical and other) instruments, and are encouraged to use their own voices to give their soundtracks a personal touch.

Watch That Sound, established in Rotterdam, makes the process of composition and sound design accessible to wider audiences in an innovative way. Since 2011, they have been developing their own software which allows users to create soundtracks for films intuitively.

Plant Orchestra

Het Plantenorkest

By offering ‘tinkering workshops’ Cinekid aims to give visitors the opportunity to get creative with many different materials and technologies. Tinkering opens up the possibilities of experimentation and generates ideas in an open, intuitive and creative way. In The Plant Orchestra participants work together on an interactive audio installation in the form of a garden full of growing plants. The plants are made from a combination of craft materials and conductors (metals), taken in part from old media devices. The participants can then think up sounds for the plants and create an electrical closed circuit that allows the plants to produce these sounds when touched.

The workshop uses the tools Makey Makey and Scratch. The tinkerers can also take a 3D photo of their plant using a 360 turntable tinkered by HotMamaHot.

Zoe Reddy is a visual and audio artist. She developed this workshop specially for Cinekid, as well as the workshop The Hunt for a Miracle.

WATCH THAT SOUND

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 | 7+

ZOE REDDY, CINEKID

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 | 7+

FACTS

Commissioned by Cinekid

The Process Machine

De Procesmachine

Robin van Es graduated last year as Interactive Performance Designer at the HKU Utrecht. In her work, she examines creativity als part of our learning proces, specifically at schools. Everyone is born as a creative being, but this is ‘unlearnt’ at school, through constricted education and pre-designed assignments. However, creativity can help us solve problems, improve the world, become motivated and learn to think out of the box.

During this workshop, the participants are being challenged to use their creativity to the fullest again, without boundaries. At a seven meters long table, up to 10 participants can paint assignments thought up by Robin. It is a communal making proces, with the focus on the process and not on the end result.

The finished works will be added to the process totem as a tribute, together with all the other works.

Save the world in Roblox

Red de wereld in Roblox

With more than 45 million daily users, mostly children, Roblox is one of the fastest growing games worldwide. Roblox is not strictly speaking 1 game, but is made up of more dan 50 million mini-games. Users can also chat and make friends. What YouTube is for user-generated video content, Roblox is for user-generated game content. It has an online game-creator system, and the vast majority of the content is made by amateur game-makers.

For this workshop, Cinekid entered into a cooperation with software developer Twan van Gelder, an early Roblox adaptor. He has been working with the platform since 2009 and can be seen as a real Dutch Roblox expert. Like many Roblox developers, this is where he learned to program. For Cinekid, he developed a workshop where children can get to work as Roblox developers and make their own obstacle courses. Both beginners and advanced makers can take part in this workshop.

ROBIN VAN ES

THE NETHERLANDS | 2020 | 6+

FACTS

Outdoor Programme of Cinekid

TWAN VAN GELDER

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 |

FACTS

Commissioned by Cinekid

Timbre the classroom

Timbre in de klas

How would it be if you could paint with your voice? Monobanda developed a playful interactive installation you control using your voice. This masterclass uses the game installation to allow the participants to discover (the power of) their own voices. The game transforms the sound of the participants’ voices into shapes and colours

on a screen.

The masterclass is given by voice coach Rian Evers, who acts as the link between the group and the game. Together with the ‘Digigent’ (digital conductor), who can be seen on the screen, Rian helps the children playfully explore their vocal capabilities. This starts with breathing and sound exercises. The participants learn how variations in pitch, volume and length of the sounds they produce have different effects. They learn to harmonise together and to visualise their voices on paper. Finally, together the group create an abstract voice painting, a Gesamtkunstwerk, made entirely from their own voices.

TwoSides

TwoSides is a dance installation and craft workshop in one, where participants can get to know their good and bad sides in a playful way and recreate these. The work challenges the participants to actively get to grips with new media, with the aim of achieving self-reflection and awareness of their own body language. After making a clay model of a fantasy figure depicting the two sides of yourself, you scan this using a 3D scanner and then colour it in digitally. The avatars made by the participants then come to life on a big screen, on a virtual dance floor amongst all the other avatars, through the dance moves of their creators. These dance moves ultimately determine which side of the maker is the strongest.

Nou&Herkauw was set up in 2006 by Adri Schokker and Ruben Boxman. They develop games, interactive installations and workshops, particularly for children. They always start out from the same principle: it has to be a makeable idea and the technology used has to be simple and intuitive.

MONOBANDA

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 |

NOU&HERKAUW

THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 | 7+