The 8th Sharjah International Film Festival (SIFF 2021) has opened with a host of engaging and action-oriented workshops at their virtual Kids and Youth Studio that are offering expert tips to young creatives on a host of topics covering filmmaking, animation, media arts and more.

At the ‘Create Your Own World in 3D’ workshop in the Youth Studio on Monday (October 11) morning, for instance, led by Thomas Kutschera, Senior 3D Generalist at PIXOMONDO, participants built their first animation on Maya2020, a popular 3D animation, modelling, simulation and rendering software for film, games and TV.

“3D enables us to do casting, modelling, lighting, build our own characters, and basically create a whole movie using 3D”, said Kutschera as he showed attendees the basics of rotating objects like 3D spheres, polygons and hexagons, scaling and squeezing them as per the desired ratio.

Bit by bit, participants constructed a 3D plane, perfecting its various elements – wheels, edges, seats and other fine details. They finished the project by adding shading, light and warmth specifications before turning their creations into a complete 3D animation via Maya’s ‘Graphic Animator’ tool.

Merging technology and talent to build unique narratives

Organised by the Emirates Schools Establishment (ESE), a workshop titled ‘My Story in the Small Screen’ saw trainer Bilal Djelassi guiding participants on writing simple documentary scripts to describe moments at school or with families or friends, and highlighted ways to leverage technological tools used for audio-visual documentation.

“Documentary making starts with a brilliant idea”, he said adding that the other ingredients required to make simple documentaries are just a smartphone and a piece of paper.

Throughout SIFF 2021, ESE will be hosting a series of workshops, namely, ‘My Phone Makes My Story’ and ‘Directing: Between Creativity and Leadership’ on October 12; ‘Filmmaking-the Art of Acting’ on October 13 and ‘How to Write an Exciting Script’ on October 14.

The second workshop at the Kids Studio titled ‘Script Writing’, hosted by the Oman Film & Theatre Society and led by trainer Muhammad Al Kindi focused on positive storytelling that will help shape positive perspectives on society, economy, culture and so on. Attendees were offered a step-by-step guide on transforming their idea into a full script by deepening their understanding on how to pick characters, place and time; plot creation, and finally, reaching a climax before reaching the end, which Al Kindi said should be positive and even open-ended to get the audiences draw their own conclusions.

SIFF 2021 runs until Friday, October 15, and has lined up more than 34 workshops across its two studios, which can be attended for free by simply registering on this link: https://siff.ae/.