Weโ€™re proud to finally get to show you the fantastic animationย video that we’ve been helping the young people of Warrington Youth Club put together to help them promote their amazing Buddy Up Film Club programme.

After it’s launch 2010,ย Buddy Up is a wonderful befriending project which supports children and young people across Warrington with additional needs, offering them a ‘Buddy’ with whom they can try social activities with. The project gives these young people opportunities that they may not otherwise have the access to, while building a degree of independence along the way.

Warrington Youth Club’s Buddy Up scheme offers activities not only for young people but it also provides support to family members and carers; โ€œBuddy Up Family Film Clubโ€; is a twice-monthly cinema night held in Penketh High School providing films for attendees to enjoy together in a community environment.

Recently some of the Film Club members decided that they wanted to produce a short animation to capture the success and ethos of the Film Club, aiming to inspire more people to join or set up their own clubs, and that is where we came in to assist with our film-makingย expertise.ย 

The Finished Production

Film Club Leader, Nuvvy spoke to us about their ideas to make a video production and brought along young volunteers at the Film Club, Nathan, Niall and Zak to three separate sessions held at our offices.ย With these sessions under guidance, together we drafted a plan and storyboard together to visualise their ideas before starting production on their video.ย 

The basis of the shortย video was to interview people who had benefitted from the Buddy Up project, to discover why the film club is important to them. These interviews would then give our young animators the means to creatively communicate their message about the success of their Film Nights.

Zak and Niall help Nuvvy toย run and manage the club giving them greater support mechanism and responsibility with regular film quizzes for attendees and voting competitions for the next films to be screened.

The project required careful planning as we includedย audio from prerecordedย interviews which needed to be timed into the stop-motion animationย and making full use of different materials to tell the story of our young volunteers.
From these interviews, Lego characters were created to represent the young people. We decided that using lego characters as avatars helped to circumvent any issues or anxieties that the young people had about appearing within the film.ย 

Then over three sessions, our young participants learned skills on how to create a stop-motion animation using these characters.ย Our work was to help manage the project under the time constraints using our knowledge of providing stop-motion workshops for both young people and educators.

We were very fortunate to be supported by Mako Create in producing this animation.ย  Not only were they very easy to work with; ย however their support, enthusiasm but more so their encouragement of our young people and how they engaged with them;ย  made the whole project a huge success.ย  I found the staff at Mako to also be very professional and efficient in terms of timescales and communication.ย  A real pleasure to work with.

I would highly recommend Mako Create, and look forward to our members working with them again in the very near future.

Nuvvy Sibia

Buddy Up Project Co-ordinator, OnSide Warrington Youth Club

Warrington Youth Club’s ethos is โ€˜Inspiring Young People to Achieveโ€™ and we would like to thank Nuvvy and the team, for giving us the opportunity to help them learn and create this video production. The Family Film nights that they host have grown and developed over recent years with the award of โ€œInto Film Club of the Year 2016โ€ for the over 13 years category.ย The aim of the video is to ultimately continue to grow the project and to support and build confidence to as many young people as possible. They also plan to submit the video to the Into Film’sย โ€œBest Animation Aged 13 and overโ€ category at the 2018 Into Film Awardsย and we wish them every success inย their endeavours.ย