Films pour enfants

Mix photographs and drawings

Visual arts6-11 years old

Educational activity around the short film Perfect Houseguest

Expected end of activities

9-11 years: Represent the surrounding world or give shape to your imagination by exploring the diversity of areas. Choose, organize and use gestures, tools and materials according to the effects they produce.

6-9 years: Create plastic productions. Propose inventive responses in an individual or collective project.

Perfect Houseguest

Perfect Houseguest © Tiny Inventions

TitlePerfect Houseguest

ThemeAnimals

Genre & keywordsWonderful, walk, mouse, storage.

Age (for film)3-11 years

Duration01 min 34 s

DirectorM. Porter & R. Kuwahata

MusicBram Meindersma

ProductionTiny Inventions (United States, 2015)

Educational activities

Analyze an artistic technique and reproduce it in a personal and/or collective production.

This short film allows us to follow a little mouse who cleans and tidies the house. It contains two elements of different natures which mix: images from reality (real shooting with a camera), and drawings which come from the author's imagination. It can serve as a starting point for a visual arts sequence. After a first viewing, ask the children to describe the elements that are in the short film. Through a question/answer game, make them aware of the fact that the short film is made up of a mixture of images from reality and drawings imagined by the creator. Is this video a film or a cartoon? What's the difference? Play the video again and pause the image, ask the students to describe what they see: photographic image taken with a camera or drawing?

After this analysis, students can be asked to create a visual production mixing photographic images and drawings. Everyone will have to define a theme. Offer them magazines from which they will cut out images and stick them on a support. They will have to complete with drawings. Each of them will then be able to present their work to the class, and it will be interesting to compare the productions.

Activity sheet written by: Valérie du blog Val 10. Discover the Val 10 blog...

Eiffel Tower, photo + 3D drawing, © Olivier Defaye
Pont au Change, (photo + 3D drawing), 2012 © Christophe Defaye