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Aloysians Project Themselves in Project with Glasgow School of Art
Delight in Learning
In a unique partnership project between St Aloysius’ College and the Glasgow School of Art, a Bafta Award winning artist, Kevin Walls, spent 12 weeks working as the College’s Artist in Residence guiding Aloysians as they created innovative self-portraits - watch the results and read pupil reflections below.
This was the first ‘Artist in Residence’ partnership between St Aloysius’ College and the Glasgow School of Art who, as close neighbours in Glasgow’s Cultural Quarter, have shared a number of projects together in the past year.
Kevin Walls is a recent graduate of the Glasgow School of Art and was a BAFTA Scotland prize winner at the British Academy Scotland New Talent Awards in 2015, winning the Best Sound category for his Masters film, Identical.
As St Aloysius’ College Artist in Residence, Kevin worked with two S2 classes and two P6 classes for 12 weeks, guiding Aloysians as they created 30 second Audio Visual Self-Portraits which aimed to investigate and communicate their personalities through image and sound.
The work of the Primary 6 Classes was recently presented to teachers, parents and family members at the beginning of the Junior School Summer Show, and when addressing the audience, Kevin said the project aimed to…
“…encourage the pupils to think about how they perceived their own personalities and about how they presented themselves to others.”
The Primary 6 pupils developed impressive creativity and video editing skills as they worked on their 30 second Audio Visual Self Portraits, which you can watch below, using their iPads and Apple’s iMovie programme.
Developing even more advanced skills, the S2 pupils produced their own images, audio and video sequences for their films which they created and edited using Shotcut video editing software.
Ahead of the project, Mrs Daly, the Head of Art and Design at the College, spoke about how exciting the collaboration was and how pupils would benefit, saying,
“This is the establishment, for the first time, of an exciting collaboration between the College and the student and Alumni body of Glasgow School of Art. Pupils in the College will benefit greatly from working with an up-and-coming artist on a project that showcases contemporary practice, ideas and inspirations.”
The Primary 6 pupils produced a diary of weekly reflections about their progress and you can read some enlightening extracts below:
One of the themes Helen used to describe herself was music, explaining,
“I chose this image because I play the violin and piano. I think music is beautiful and calming with the flowers in the background of the picture. The sound effect I used is an arpeggio.”
By week 4 Damien had some creative doubts about his project but received some helpful advice from Kevin,
“In Week 4 we had to put what we are like and draw ideas of what our stories would be. I ended up changing my idea completely from my first idea but Kevin said that was okay and that sometimes you have to start again. I’m glad I decided to change it because I did better than I thought I could!”
Kate enjoyed bringing all that she had learned together in week 5 and week 6,
“Time to start making the iMovie about me! Today we put our ideas and pictures of ourselves onto iMovie and added sound! I found this tricky at first but then I got the hang of it with help from my friends. I really enjoyed it as I could play around with the sounds and images to help describe me!”
Reflecting on the entire experience, Gabriel said,
“Writing my project diary about what I have done the past 6 weeks has helped me to reflect on the fantastic time I have had learning with Kevin. I have learned so much about iMovie and editing photos and also about how sound effects can change what you think about a movie!”
