Arun Kelp Projects

15 year 5 and 6 students from River Beach and Summerlea Primary schools worked with visiting artists including Saltwater Creations, divers from the inspirational Sussex Underwater and educators from Sussex Wildlife Trust to learn about the incredible rewilding work of the Sussex Kelp Recovery Programme. This included a brilliant creative field trip with Sussex Wildlife Trust, who took us to Felpham beach to see the impact of the kelp’s recovery first hand.

Supported by 3 film and fine art students from Chichester University, our young creative leaders then explored film making techniques and storyboarded five highly individual films.

These storyboards formed the basis of work with over 700 further students at three local schools over the next 3 months – Rustington Community Primary, Summerlea School and River Beach Primary. Here they were supported by artist Shirley Bloomfield-Davies on The Weird and Wonderful World of Kelp, Daisy Jordan on The Amazing World of Kelp, and Lucy Seeds on The Destruction of the Seabed, as well as school staff and Artswork.

To realise their storyboarded films they took part in a wide array of workshops, from claymation to costume design, hand drawn animation, experimental film making, mini worlds, foley, paper cinema and a visit to the green screen studio at Chichester University.

You can see some of the range of our workshop sessions here, including the incredible whole-school demonstration created for one of the films at River Beach School:

The final films were screened at the Windmill Theatre in Littlehampton on 5 April and hope to inspire more families about the important work of the Kelp Recovery Project in Sussex: