From today on our site you can consult all the workshops and the Master Classes that will be part of the training proposal of Visioni Fantastiche. The sections of the Festival have been designed specifically for schools of all levels, for which we have defined the formula called “3 ways to participate“, referring to those initiatives, all completely free, which will be included within the POF Educational Offering Plan 2019/2020 of the Municipality of Ravenna.

We have already seen the first move, which consists in being part of the International Competition Juries. By becoming jurors, students will have the opportunity not only to watch unpublished film selections, but also to vote them after the vision: in fact, the children themselves will choose the Best Film among the works presented. Divided into 5 categories, the Competition will address students, divided into juries according to age groups: 6+, 9+, 12+, 16+ and 18+.

The principle of age also structures the proposal of the second and third ways, namely the workshops and the Master Classes. Conceived and realized by experts in audiovisual training, the workshops will focus on practical experiences concerning cinema in its most manual aspect. Each workshop admits a maximum of 30 students and it will be possible to participate with your own class or with a cross group formed by students of different classes. Set in a similar way to a classic frontal lesson, the Master Classes will instead be open to all movie fans, offering stimulating insights to each category of students.

Lots of planned activities! Let’s start with the proposals designed for the little ones, that is those addressed to the students of the I, II and III classes of the Primary School. The 6+ workshops will feature the performers Danilo Conti and Antonella Piroli, who will involve the young students in stimulating games of shadows and lights, while the graphic designers Axel Zani and Davide Bart Salvemini will guide the small participants in the creation of a flip book inspired by Totoro, the famous character created by Hayao Miyazaki, whose film will be screened that same evening at the Palazzo dei Congressi as part of the Homage to Masters section. On the front of the Master Classes, Davide Vukich of the Circolo Sogni ‘Antonio Ricci’ will go through the main stages of the development of animation cinema, with particular reference to the history of Disney.

It is always around a character of the master Miyazaki that will focus on one of the workshops destined for the 9+ section, which is aimed at students of the IV and V classes of the Primary School and of the 1st grade Secondary Institutes. The aforementioned Zani and Salvemini will teach students how to animate the Ponyo fish girl with the technique of papercut animation. The second workshop will instead focus on stop motion animation and will see Matteo Niccolò Burani and Arianna Gheller – animators and character designers at the Croma Studio in Bologna – accompany the children in creating a puppet animation character. Students will be able to further deepen the animation in step one in the Master Class Behind the Scenes of the stop motion, in which Studio Croma will reveal tricks and background of their craft made of creativity, dexterity and precision.

For the 12+ section – that is, the students of the II and III classes of the Secondary School of first degree and of the class I of the Second Degree Secondary Institutes – the workshop activities foresee an incursion into the world of magic with the workshop held by magician Matteo Cucchi, who will lead the children on a fantastic journey between cinema and illusionism, while visual effects supervisor Giuseppe Squillaci will teach young people how to make a shot with a green screen and transform it in a creative way. VFX and special effects will also be the protagonists of the Master Class 12+, always held by Squillaci.

To 16+ students – Classes II, III and IV of Second Degree Secondary Institutes – Gianni Gozzoli, radio speaker and storyteller, will teach how to create a podcast in the Podcasting and Digital Radio workshop, while the game designer Gian Paolo Vernocchi will involve students in a game where the boys will play the role of all the figures involved in making a video game. As for the Master Classes, the university professor and critic Roy Menarini will conduct the unmissable lecture entitled The fantastic today between cinema and television series in which the recent transformations of the fantastic and sci-fi genre will be analyzed.

The offer for the 18+ category is also rich. Students aged 18 and above – grades IV and V of Secondary Institutes of 2nd grade – will be able to live the experience of creating a commercial in the two workshops conducted by the director Francesco Filippi, who will first teach the participants how to write a screenplay and then pass to an even more practical implementation phase, where the method of working on the set between roles, procedures and artistic criteria will be illustrated. Also for the 18+, two events are also scheduled for the Master Classes. In the one dedicated to the Serious Villains, the author Andrea Bernardelli and the university professor Alessandro Iannucci will investigate the new ways of constructing and narrating the protagonists of contemporary mass production. The teachers Emanuela Serri and Rossella Giovannini will hold the Master Class entitled Cinema and philosophy: friendship at the threshold of time where, inspired by Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival that will be screened following the meeting, they will face the theme of transformation of self and the world through friendship.