I first came across Busy Buttons Creative Studio when researching clever new ways to teach languages to children. Every Saturday in a school hall in Windsor, a gaggle of 3-5 year olds learn Spanish in an art class. Between the potato prints and paint splatters, a dash of ¡Venga! and ¡Damelo! slips into their vocabulary effortlessly. Simple, but brilliant.
But it turns out that this is just a small part of the full creative offering from this outfit. From film animation to costume design, prop building and puppetry, professional film and theatre designers, Louella Fernandez-Lempiainen and her husband have come up with a series of weekly courses and holiday workshops to draw children into the back-stage magic of the film world. Unlike other theatre clubs, this is not about performance but about the technical brilliance behind the scenes.
This half term, children aged 5-14 will be designing the River Bank set for an animation of The Wind in the Willows. The five-day programme will cover all types of technical skills from sculpting the heads of the lead ‘actors’ to interpreting the script. Parents can sign up their film-makers for the week (£170) or for a day (£42) at Upton House School in Windsor. See www.busybuttons.org for details.
