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Aim: We are developing puppetry, animation and production skills to provide even more creative opportunities for our Bognor Regis community.
Making Theatre Gaining Skills is a training enterprise that works with children, young people and adults. We are resident at the Bognor Makerspace, benefiting from the amazing development in the building. We have delivered a range of courses that combine vocational skills with employability, including Multiply, the Government’s numeracy programme which helps people become more confident with maths. Our innovative approach embedded numeracy into cooking, carpentry, fabric and production skills with learners then moving onto small-group maths classes which proved to be so popular we had to run several sessions each week! We were also funded by West Sussex County Council’s Adult Learning department to provide weekly creative classes in puppetry, scenic art, lighting & sound and prop & costume construction.
The company has moved progressively into puppetry and animation and, thanks to Arts Council funding, we’ve been able to appoint a Creative Director (Darren East) who is a gifted puppeteer and who led the new Traineeship for 16-25 year olds in Puppetry and Animation. We were fortunate enough to partner with Aardman Animations via their Academy which has provided bespoke learning modules and direct contact with animation mentors. We're now eager to expand our operations offering outreach workshops, short courses and weekly classes so that we can provide an even greater service to our community and help people progress to further learning and employment.
£500 would pay for all the creative materials we need to run a 4 week course in production skills for unemployed young people aged 16-25.
£1000 would pay for 3 outreach puppetry workshops, expanding our reach beyond Bognor.
£5,000 would pay for a term of weekly classes in costume and prop construction for adults aged 19+
"Really charming work! The story is clear and engaging even without any dialogue, and there’s great use of real-world textures and objects to give the mice a real sense of scale. I especially loved the creative sound effects and how well they helped sell the action. A lot of care and hard work clearly went into making this. Especially like the use of the rug to show the small mouse moving across the room! Well done!"
(Mark Hewis - Head of Aardman Academy)
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 11th September 2025 at 3:51pm