Local Theatre Designer Di Ford came along to the Ideas Lab, with an idea for making puppets from artists mannequins, which was developed into a a series of 5 bookable 2-hour afternoon creative workshops for Haverfordwest Festival Week 2017.

The workshops involved designing and making a character inspired by the nick-names of local people and then taking a photo of the character on location and uploading it to on social media with the hash tag #harfatlittlepeople to build a virtual community of ‘Little People of Haverfordwest’.

More than 150 people attended the five workshops, creating more than 100 unique characters.

The Harfat Little People project was a huge success!

The idea behind it was fairly simple, but having the little mannequins kept everything in continuity, yet every Little Person was very different! The end result was a fairly quick turn around so the children and adults were engaged throughout and it appealed to all ages.

I found that a lot of the children were too young to have a social media account therefore the online presence was not as strong as I would have liked.

To take the idea further I would like to use the Little People as characters in a stop motion animation. Offering a week long workshop for one group of participants, it would combine inventing and designing the character, creating a narrative and making a short stop motion animation.

Towards the end of the week all the workshops were fully booked. I discovered that the majority of the participants came into Haverfordwest particularly to do the workshop.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the workshops! It was fantastic to be surrounded by so much creativity. The atmosphere throughout was very calm and focused. And best of all the children and adults were using their imaginations to create unique, exciting and original pieces of art!

Di Ford