Tag Archives: Co-produced

A Pirate Story Aarrrr!

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We are all getting in the Pirate mood here at Thinktank as we look forward to our summer extraveganza, ‘The Pirates! In an adventure with Scientists!: The Exhibition’. The exhibition is packed full of the Aardman Animation sets used in the film (of the same name) as well as interactives, dressing up and even a model Dodo from Oxford University Museum of Natural History. To find out what a Dodo has to do with a Pirate crew you’ll have to watch the film!

As part of our Piratey celebrations we will be running Pirate themed storytelling all summer. To help us come up with the best story possible we invited a group of our Season Ticket holding families to come and write it with us. You may remember we did a similar project with our We Made It Story and it was so much fun we decided to do it again, though without creating a book this time!

Once again we worked with the brilliant storyteller, Anna, who led the group on an adventure to create the characters and plot line for our story.  The kids (and adults!) took part in a whole range of arts and crafts, singing, acting and game playing to get the creative juices flowing. Check out some of their creations below!

The families were wonderful to work with, and reminded us how lucky we are to be surrounded by people who want to give us their time and get involved in our work. Look out for the story once it launches at the end of the month!

The Finished Storybook!

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 A very quick post to say… our beautiful new storybooks are here! This project, to create a children’s storybook set in the We Made It gallery and with local children, has been many months in the making so it is wonderful to finally hold the finished product. The books will be available for visitors to borrow for free as part of our new We Made It Parent Packs, from the 16th of February 2013.  

Open Book

                                 Open Book

Story Book!

                               Story Book!

Story Book Illustrations

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With the We Made It Gallery nearly finished lots of the other projects we have been working on are also reaching completion, including my favourite one, the story book project!

In my first post about this project I explained how we had held a story writing day with a group of local families, storyteller, Anna, and illustrator, Rosie. Since then they have both been hard at work turning all the wonderful ideas that came out of that day into the finished book. Although we are only a few weeks away from the finished product I thought I’d share a few of the illustrations that are in the book, as well as some early sketches to show how they developed.

Rosie began by designing each of the characters, first in pencil and then in water colour.

Sketching the front cover

Sketching the front cover

 

You can see how the sketches develop through these drawings of the main character Jem!

An early sketch of the main character Jem

An early sketch of  Jem

 

The completed colour version

The completed colour version

She then created a rough storyboard and began arranging the characters into scenes based on the text created by Anna. Here is one of the heroes of the story, Tiger, in early sketches and the finished scene.

An early sketch of the tiger in pencil

An early sketch of the tiger in pencil

The finished illustration on the page

The finished illustration on the page

These scenes have all come together to create the finished book! It is now our task to re-create this digitally, with the text in place, to send for printing.

Watch this space for the finished product!

Thinktank’s Kids in Museums Take Over Day

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Meet another group of We Made It participants, the Take Over Day team!

Kids in Museums Take Over Day is an annual event which aims to encourage museums to involve kids in their work. We decided to use the day a few weeks ago to host a group of children from a charity called The Feast and involve them in designing one of the new family activities for We Made It.

The activity is called Sense Station, a trolley that will allow visitors to handle replicas of objects on display in the gallery and try out demonstrations and experiments that relate to We Made It. The idea is that if kids are involved in designing the activity, then it will be even better for the families that ultimately come to use it. It’s a lot more work for me but so so worth it!

We, of course, started the day with a behind-the-scenes visit to the We Made It Gallery which, at the time, was very much still a building site! There were, however, a few interactives already in place to try out. The unanimous favourite was this one, a spring interactive which is a lot of fun to play with.

 

Spring Interactive

                  Spring Interactive

Something I always want to do when I visit a museum is open up the cases and find out what the objects feel like! Of course, to protect the objects, this isn’t possible so our next task was to choose replica handling objects that will go on to the trolley. I re-created a selection of the object cases from all over the gallery, using photographs of the objects, and asked the group, ‘if you could reach inside the case and pick out an object which would it be’?

Chosen Objects

                           Chosen Objects

In total they chose just over 30 objects and provided the reasons for those choices using post-it notes, as shown above. It is now my task to find as many of these objects as possible! I’ve already started my search by buying this beautiful Agate slice to replicate the ones on display in the Treasure section of the gallery.

Agate Slices

Agate Slices. Handling object (top) and objects for exhibit cases (bottom)

The group’s final task was to try out some prototype activities and demonstrations, and provide feedback on them. All are related to exhibits in We Made It and are designed to help our visitors learn more about the key themes of the gallery. The feedback and ideas they suggested have been really helpful in improving these activities to make them work for our visitors. A big thank you to all the participants and The Feast (who have Blogged about their visit as well). I can’t wait to show them the finished product next year!

 

Writing a Children’s Story Book

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A long time ago (in fact in my first post on the Blog) I mentioned that the We Made It project was about much more than just a gallery re-development. On our journey we have worked with the Natural Science Volunteers, the Walking for Heritage group and the Science and Heritage Career Ladder Volunteers. Lots of people participating with the museum!

This week was the turn of four wonderful families, with 6 children between them, to spend a day with us creating a children’s story book! Why I hear you ask? Well this book will form the basis for new family activity packs for the We Made It gallery and our story for live storytelling next year. We decided to make the best story possible we should write it with children (it’s for them after all!). To achieve this ambitious task I recruited an illustrator, Rosie, and a storyteller Anna, and together we created an action packed day of story creating.

We started by coming up with the hero of our story, a character named Jem who visits the We Made It gallery at Thinktank with her grandpa. Just like Jem we explored the gallery too, though our visit was ‘behind-the-scenes’ of course!:

In the We Made It Thermal House

In the We Made It Thermal House

We reached the Tree of Wood in the Gadget section of the gallery and decided that Jem’s adventure would begin here as she used the tree to travel into a magical land!

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To help us come up with ideas we made some music together using lots of different instuments:

 

Exploring We Made It

Making Music in We Made It

We then headed back to our classroom to do lots of drama and art to come up with the other main characters for our story and create the magical land that Jem travels to. We explored man-made objects, textures and materials by creating rubbings and prints (see pictures below). These will be directly used by Rosie to create the illustrations for the book.

I can’t tell you any more as that would give away the story! However, I can say that it is far better than anything we at the museum could have come up with alone; the imagination of children is amazing! Rosie and Anna will spend between now and February pulling the ideas together into the finished book ready for printing.   

Thank you so much to the families who participated. It was a thoroughly enjoyable day and we look forward to showing you the finished product!

The Final Completed Walking Trail!

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Slow Boat and the Walking for Heritage Team

Slow Boat and Walking for Heritage Team

The blog has been heavily dominated of late by our Walking for Heritage project. I promise I will stop writing about it soon! Ever since our lovely young people created their walking trail we have been working hard to re-make their prototype into a version we can publish. Only very minor changes were needed as the prototype itself was of a really high quality and had some wonderful, original features.

Take a look at the final version at the link below (its sadly too large to up-load to the Blog!)  

www.thinktank.ac/walking_for_heritage

We will now get some paper copies into the leaflet holders in our galleries and make the trail available on our website. All that’s needed then is for people to get walking! If you’re looking for something to do in Birmingham why not check it out and let us know how you got on!  

Another Walking Map Update!

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After a LOT of messing about I have (hopefully) improved on the Walking Trail mentioned in my last post. I have also used a different piece of software called Tripline to make the trail, to see which is the better tool. Tripline looks really slick but lacks some of the features of Google Maps. Take a look and see which you prefer!  


View Walking for Heritage in Historic Digbeth in a larger map

Walking For Heritage Online Trail

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A few weeks ago I worked on a project to create a walking trail around Digbeth with a group of young people (you many remember I mentioned it a LOT!). Well although the co-production side of the project is finished I am still working hard to get the trail published both online and in paper leaflets. Below is the first draft of an interactive google map showing the walking trail and featured landmarks. I’m hoping the young people who worked with me on the trail will take a look at it and add their comments! I’m wondering-

Is there enough text information about each landmark?

Should each image have a border around it?

Are there enough directions to help people find their way around the route?

Is there anything else they would like to add?

Thanks guys!


View Walking for Heritage in Historic Digbeth in a larger map

Walking for Heritage.. making map art!

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On the third day of the Walking for Heritage project the team got all arty with local artist and presenter Rosie Wells. We were asked by Rosie to think of a way we could represent ourselves through a piece of art, using maps as a starting point. As a completely un-arty person the challenge was a little daunting at first! However, she encouraged us to not think about what we were doing too much and to just put pen/pastel to paper! Everyone put loads of effort in and the results were brilliant.  

Here’s a selection of what we managed to produce.

Walking for Heritage Day 1!

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Map Research
A selection of maps and books to start the research process
 
Today the Walking for Heritage project began in earnest with 8 wonderful young people coming along to take part (to my great relief!). To re-cap Walking for Heritage involves the research and creation of a new walking trail in Digbeth, the area local to the museum. We began the day talking through the project and thinking about what heritage means to different people. We then moved on to the tricky topic of ‘What is a map?’. Though it initially sounds simple this turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer! To do so we took a look at lots of different maps on the BBC Beauty of Maps archive sitewith this Fred Rose, Serio Comic War Map in particular catching our attention.

Fred Rose Map

This cartoon-map comments on the events taking place in Europe in 1877.

We learnt that a map can be far more than just a series of roads and houses when it comes to presenting a message and ideas. Hopefully today was just the start of our journey of discovery! Tomorrow’s action packed day contains a boat trip and visit to the central library so expect lots of photos!