Raising Climate Awareness with Discovery Film Festival
Taking short film workshops to Dundee primary schools
Following our 2024 Discovery Film Festival, we pulled out some of the short films from the programme and put together a collection to take out to schools.
Focusing on the curriculum-relevant theme of climate awareness, we piloted short film workshops in six primary schools across the city. Linking with wider campaigns like Earth Day, World Climate Awareness Day and World Environment Day, we shared the selection of short films and pupils discussed what they saw and made artwork inspired by the messages in the films.
Here you can learn more about the project and see some of the work created by the pupils...
Published
Workshops
We visited St Pius, St Francis, Tayview, Craigowl and St Joseph's Primary Schools, with Inverbrothock Primary School coming to DCA for their session.
Each workshop was inspired by viewing three short animated films: Agua (Mexico), What's Up With the Sky (Spain) and A Love Story in Milk (UK). Each film has a very different visual style but they are linked by their strong environmental messages.
After watching the films, pupils learned more about animation processes and how films are storyboarded. They also took part in a discussions about how they felt each film communicated a key message and what that message was. They focused on character, colour, camera, materials, style, sound, setting and story and looked at how each element conveyed the film's message.
Feedback
Teachers fed back that the sessions helped to enhance learning in a number of curriculum areas, such as Literacy, STEM, Expressive Art & Design and Health and Wellbeing, and really connected with school projects and Eco Groups. The sessions were also very much enjoyed by pupils - here's what they had to say:
I liked the workshop. I really want to make my own [animation].
I felt good. I loved the part when the environment always won.
I thought that the films are very important because they tell people what is happening in the world.
I liked this because I learned new stuff. Thank you for coming.
What I like about the workshop is that we learnt about eco friendly and how we can change the world to a better place and cleaner!!
Artwork
Pupils from Inverbrothock Primary School created some wonderful collaged artworks in response to the short films, which we recently displayed on the wall of Create Space.
Other schools shared that several of their pupils have already started making their own stop-motion animations and flip books. It's great to see how the short films and animation process really connected with the pupils.
Discovery Film Festival 2025 takes place at DCA from Sat 25 October to Sun 2 November, bringing films from around the world to Dundee. Take a look below at our programme for schools and the films and workshops we've got lined-up for families.
