01 October 2009

DOHA: The Doha Tribeca Film Festival (DTFF) team will offer workshops on animation and acting in the coming weeks.

The animation workshops, which will include sand animation, drawing, papercut, Plasticine animation, and flip book, among others, will be handled by DTFF's Community Outreach Programmer Palestinian award-winning filmmaker Scandar Copti.

Copti said they have chosen three schools where they will have the workshops. They will be inviting around 15 students below 15 years of age to join the four-hour workshops.

"We will have one workshop for each school and if everything goes well, we might go back for more workshops... We will teach them plenty of animation techniques... At the end of the day, they will have a movie... 20 or 30 seconds, maybe," said Copti, who handled the two 1-Minute Filmmaking workshops organised by the DTFF team earlier. The participants were taught how to make one-minute films, coming up with a story, script writing, working with a team, coming up with a budget for a film, choosing music, editing style, and talking and interacting with the cameramen and editors, among others.

Copti said the team will also have workshops at some malls here, one is the City Centre. "We will be at the City Centre, for example, and parents can go there with their kids and join the three-hour animation workshop we will be giving there. We are also planning on having more animation workshops, this time, for adults."

Plasticine animation is also known as claymation. It was formulated by art teacher William Harbutt of Bathampton in Bath, England, in 1897. He wanted a non-drying clay for use by his sculpture students. Although the exact composition is a secret, Plasticine is composed of calcium salts (principally calcium carbonate), petroleum jelly, and long-chain aliphatic (principally stearic acid). It is non-toxic, sterile, soft, malleable, and does not dry on exposure to air. Sand animation is the kind where animators move around sand on a backlighted or frontlighted piece of glass to create each frame for their animated films. Caroline Leaf is a pioneer of this type of animation.

"Making animation is like performing magic... It is very easy and kids, they don't know how it is done... We will show them how...," said Copti.

"If I put a glass here and I take a photo of it and then I put it here and take another photo and then another one and then I put the photos one after the other and I upload them and use this software... then it will show the glass moving... that's animation... it's the same as drawing," he said.

Copti said the DTFF team will also offer acting workshops for 12 to 15 participants. They have not picked the venue, yet, however. "It will be very intensive and very physical and we will teach them basic techniques like improvisations in front of a camera."

He said the workshops will be documented. "Everything we do during this festival is being documented so we can learn from our mistakes and we can improve on them."

The DTFF, which is a brainchild of H E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority, will be launched on October 29 and will end on November 1.

By Joyce C Abaño

© The Peninsula 2009