February 24th was the day of the official screening of various films in the Cinema Massimo. They couldn’t have been more different in their making-of, their more or less serious themes and the time it took to make them. However, they had one thing in common: the enthusiasm and pride of the children having made or having participated in the short films.

Just to mention the other screenings: We started our afternoon cinema session with a re-interpretation of the famous story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on which the children had worked for months in cooperation with the Casa Oz, an association for diseased children and close to our hospital, and the National Cinema Museum of Turin. We finished with the presentation of a short trailer to a documentation film of 1h 40 about the life of diseased children and their families who both have to face difficulties or unbearable situations.

The golden mean to those was our cartoon “DeveLOOP – One Step for a green Future” made by some of our students in cooperation with the children of the Chelsea Hospital School.

The technique for these kind of films is found in earlier film-making when films were still shown as individual pictures on a roll turning the roll fast enough to achieve moving pictures and whole scenes.

What the children basically did was drawing individual pictures with little alterations of scenes belonging to the overall topic of environment and pollution on teeny-tiny rolls of film. Shown very fast successively they form a whole sequence. The director Vincenzo Gioanola showed us how to make this technique work and together with him and the National Cinema Museum of Turin the film turned out to be a wonderful work of unique and funny drawings accompanied by matching sounds and music. The titles introduce the various sequences and explain what they are about. The cartoon shows the ideas children have of the impact pollution has on the environment, of sustainable resources and energy and of a healthy life and nutrition and is therefore given the title DeveLOOP as a play on words for “develop” and the technique used for making the film – the application of loops.

Here you can watch our film:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd0T4uc2IuE