FRAME

Children F1rst is a programme run by CINANIMA’s Educational Service, with the support of the Directorate-General for Education – National Film Plan. Created in 2016, this initiative is one of the most important activities in the field of education, precisely because it promotes active cultural education.

Interrupted in the 2019/2022 academic year and returning in full force in the 2022/23 academic year.

With a team of trainers and animated film directors, it produces animated films in pre-school (5 years old) and primary schools. This initiative covers all the different stages and processes of animation production and is therefore structured around project methodology and animated image teaching.

The development of educational practice through project methodology reflects teachers’ concern with building meaningful learning experiences for their students. In the field of education, project methodology is normally understood as the organisation of the teaching and learning process around meaningful practical activities. Animated films are universally recognised as fascinating and familiar to children, transporting them to a world of magic, imagination and play. An emotional connection is established from the outset, which facilitates their attention to teaching and learning processes. The aim is to harness these stimuli as educational potential in order to build a strategy that can foster in each student the ability to learn within a motivating, participatory and collaborative space.

Animated cinema has its own language, which is at once aesthetic, technological, scientific, historical, narrative, audiovisual, among many other things. It is, therefore, a multidisciplinary language that operates at the boundaries of various areas of knowledge and which, in the school curriculum for the 1st Cycle of Basic Education (and now also in Pre-school for 5-year-olds), is reflected in the subjects of Portuguese, Mathematics, Social Studies and Expressions.

In this sense, the use of animated images in teaching promotes a better understanding of school content, its active, meaningful, diversified, integrated and socialising integration, resulting in better results.

The work with students is organised into four stages:

• Principle of animation;
• Construction of the argument;
• Character development, set design, voice recording and sound effects;
• Frame-by-frame image capture.

*At the end of the academic year, the films are submitted to more than 20 international animated film festivals.

The film screenings presenting the Children F1rst activity bring the programme’s annual cycle to a close, allowing pupils, parents, family members and teachers to watch the films produced by the children on the big screen in a cinema.