Read, Cut & Film is a structured creative method that combines the foundations of classical pedagogy with the creative potential of the digital age, using storytelling and animation to support children facing migration and cultural adaptation.
The method sits at the intersection of classical papercraft, animation and storytelling. It brings together choosing and reading the story, discussing it and identifying what matters most in the plot, preparing a hand-drawn outline of the future film (a storyboard), making paper characters, shooting frame-by-frame stop-motion animation, and presenting the finished film.
The method works in two ways. It can be used with our purpose-built Kits — developed for Read, Cut & Film by child psychologists, professional editors, artists and animators — and it can be run from scratch by tutors and educators in art classes, after-school clubs and similar settings. In the second case, tutors and children choose stories together, prepare backgrounds and characters, run the shoot and the presentation, guided by the core principles of the method.
Thanks to the Kits, to widely available filming tools and to simple free apps for stop-motion shooting and editing, Read, Cut & Film makes it possible for a child to reach a tangible result — their own animated film — within one or two class sessions.
By bringing storytelling, papercraft and stop-motion together, Read, Cut & Film raises these familiar creative practices to a new level. The kind of storytelling we develop here rests on classical and archetypal narratives — and the underlying intention is that a story re-told by the child through making a film becomes part of their own personal experience.
The method is designed for children aged 8–12: the age at which play remains a natural way of getting involved in the world while thinking has already begun to take on more structure. Its creators take the view that technology should extend and amplify a child's creative capacity, not substitute for it by generating the result.
Sessions of Read, Cut & Film can be run individually, with each child making their own film, or in pairs or small groups. Even when a child works alone, the final stage — presenting the finished film to other children or to a tutor (who may equally be a parent) — remains an essential part of the method. The method has worked particularly well in mixed-age groups, especially in non-classroom settings. No prior experience is needed: for many children, this becomes the first animated film they have ever made.
The point of the method is to take material chosen and offered to the child and use it to awaken their emotion and imagination, channel that energy into a creative process, and bring it to a finished result that the child can both explain and stand behind. The materials we put in the child's hands (stories, backgrounds, characters) and the actions we ask of them (discussion, drawing, cutting, filming, presenting their own work) are not designed to suppress creativity but to develop it: to take what was imagined, step by step, to the goal of a film that has been made.
Every stage of the Read, Cut & Film process is intuitive and natural for a child. The clearest evidence of this is what happens by the second or third film: a pattern of self-directed learning sets in, and a tutor's help is rarely needed at any stage of the work. By the time a child has finished a third film, they are usually ready to share what they have learned and to act as a mentor for new participants.
In our pilot groups, we found that producing a fully formed original narrative based on the chosen story is desirable but by no means a precondition for filming. Although at the planning stage children are invited to complete a storyboard already prepared by professional animators — a step intended to make the sequencing of shots much easier — children, especially at the start, often want to skip this and go straight to filming. The absence of a clearly fixed plan shapes the result in two opposite ways. For some children, it gives them a reason to think again: they realise that sketching out the scenes in advance would have made the film stronger and the intent clearer to the viewer. But just as often, it is precisely while searching for their own visual solution during the shoot itself that a child discovers what the chosen story is really about and why it matters to them personally. The working compromise we offer is this: a storyboard, like any plan, is needed — but sometimes only so that it can be broken. It is not a rigid script; it is a starting point.
This more relaxed attitude to planning does not soften the central principle of Read, Cut & Film: a creative impulse must lead to a result, and that requires not only imagination but also the ability to concentrate and to see the work through to the end. These are precisely the universal and broadly useful capacities the method as a whole is designed to develop.
A film shoot, then, is play with a purpose. The stages of this play — of this children's work — do not exist in isolation: each step shapes the next. Read, Cut & Film unfolds in five steps.
Children make their characters either by inventing and drawing them themselves or by cutting them from a prepared Kit; using split pins (paper fasteners — available in any DIY shop), they give their figures movable parts suitable for frame-by-frame shooting. In a child's hands, paper characters come to life and take on character of their own.
At the same time, working with paper and scissors makes the story tangible and concrete. This is usually the moment, with imagination already at work and fine motor coordination engaged, when the shift happens from what was imagined to what is now visible.
Once the characters are ready, a short break before the shoot is sometimes useful — not because the cutting itself is hard, but because this is when concentration on the process is at its most intense. In our pilot groups, we have repeatedly seen young animators come up with the visual ideas at exactly this moment that they then carry over onto the set — solutions whose originality professional animators might envy.
Setting up the shoot is an important part of the process. The background — the location where the action will take place — needs to be put in place and held steady, whether it has been prepared by professional artists or made beforehand under a tutor's guidance. The child or group then shoots a stop-motion film on a smartphone, moving the characters around the location frame by frame. There is now a wide choice of high-quality free stop-motion apps available on every platform.
At this point, the story — already settled in the child's imagination as a narrative — is translated into the language of film: the group talks about how to alternate close-ups and wide shots, how to build a scene, what rhythm to set, what effects to use, and much more besides. (In the Kits, all of this is laid out in step-by-step instructions for each film, with notes from professional animators; but in practice, especially with younger groups working on Read, Cut & Film, introducing the possibilities of cinematic language usually falls to the tutor.)
Choices about visual means are where the originality of a child's vision shows itself most clearly, and this skill grows visibly from one film to the next. Social skills are sharpened at the same time: creative enthusiasm often produces disagreements — with the tutor and with collaborators on the shoot. What is difficult is not the disagreement itself but the inability to resolve it. The point is for children to learn to work through it without giving up either their own idea and vision on one side, or the shared push towards the finished result on the other.
Today, basic post-production — rearranging sections, adding music, sound, voice-over and even simple visual effects — can be done in the same app used to shoot. Children from around the age of ten typically already have some basic familiarity with simple editing software on a computer. In any case, the importance of editing on a child's first films should not be overstated: children do not judge the result the way adults do.
The presentation of the film takes the form of a premiere, and preparing for it can become a creative activity of its own. Children can draw posters and tickets that they will keep afterwards as a memento. If sessions have run as a group, each creative team can introduce its own film. Even when several children have worked on the same source story, comparing one's own film with what other children made is itself an important part of the "playing-at-being-a-director" experience.
A tutor, at the presentation stage, needs to keep in mind that for a middle-grade child what matters is that the response from the adult side carries two things: recognition of the Work that has been made, and an assessment of the child's effort in terms of how the original idea relates to the result. The first is essential if the child is to keep going with animation and creative work in general; the second opens a conversation about the skills the child can keep building. The tutor's task here is to balance the two.
It is at this final stage that the emotional and creative experience becomes meaningful — and the play (the children's work), carried through to its end, leaves the child with satisfaction and the desire to set out for new cinematic horizons.
Making an animated film from a story, a fairy tale or a myth does not replace lessons or reading. It helps the child, through "playing at being a director", make classical narratives their own. Animation here is not the goal but the means: the child learns to tell a story not by being taught, but by carrying on playing.
For children, play is not a reward at the end of learning; it is one of its most natural forms. It is through play that a child more easily takes on complex structures: plot, sequence of events, cause and effect.
Read, Cut & Film does not set out to train children to make professional cartoons. What it can do is engage them — and through engagement build and reinforce the skills of constructing a vivid audiovisual narrative through "playing at animation", in its most absorbing form: stop-motion, which is analogue at heart.
Read, Cut & Film is neither free drawing nor a strict lesson with predetermined answers. Children play, which means they "work" inside a given structure but make their own creative decisions at every stage. They are not starting from nothing — and they are not following an instruction sheet either.
The film is made in a group. Even when the shoot itself is individual, the child still has a tutor to orient towards and an imagined audience in mind. This is precisely where space opens up at once for self-expression and for a kind of distance dialogue with a viewer. In a group format, that experience also includes negotiation, sharing of roles, conflict and agreement. The meeting of the individual and the social, and the way they work on each other, is built into the process itself.
A child's understanding of a story and its undercurrent comes through action, through the making of something material — in our case, the turning of a paper character into a "living" hero. Imagination meets the real, but the two do not collide: one passes smoothly into the other, and the abstract takes on concrete features. Paper, scissors, the cutting that demands focus — these are the necessary pause after the excitement of having an idea, a kind of bridge to reality, because images are abstract while finished works are made by hand and by following a clear sequence of actions.
Stop-motion shooting demands concentration and fine motor control. The process catches a child up completely from the very first minutes. The creators of the method have done everything possible to make the child's work on set easier: in the Kits, backgrounds and characters are designed so that, compared with professional cut-out animation, the child can focus on the character of the movement itself and is not held up by technical complications.
Children who arrive with a marked attachment to devices first go through a short "switching over" — they almost seem puzzled, even surprised, that they have become interested in something in the non-digital world. But we have seen again and again in our pilot groups that they then go on to film for hours on end, and make no attempt to "hide" inside the smartphone.
In Read, Cut & Film, the smartphone is used purely as a tool — a camera and an editing desk — while the child's wider creative environment for that time becomes paper-based, analogue and shared.
Read, Cut & Film rests on principles laid down in the classical works of the founders of modern educational thought: Lev Vygotsky, Johan Huizinga, John Dewey, Seymour Papert and Jerome Bruner.
From Johan Huizinga to Lev Vygotsky, children's play — liberi ludi — has been understood as a way of mastering the world rather than as a break from learning.
Read, Cut & Film fits closely with the idea of the zone of proximal development: a child, working with others (a parent, a tutor, another child), can do what they cannot yet do alone.
From John Dewey to Seymour Papert runs a single thread: knowledge arises in the process of making. In our changed reality, many have tried to transfer this thesis automatically into the digital world. Without dismissing what becomes possible there, the creators of Read, Cut & Film propose, as one of the earlier rungs of learning, that the skills involved in making something be consolidated specifically in analogue form — as the foundation on which a child's potential can later be opened up with the help of digital tools.
As Jerome Bruner argued so persuasively, a person makes sense of themselves through stories. Working with a story, a child does more than understand a text: they try out images and roles, shift the emphasis, make the story their own. In a world in which the inflation of statements and content has, paradoxically, brought about a deficit of values, the creators of Read, Cut & Film consciously place the weight of the method on the stories that have come to be called "the sources of moral life": myths, fairy tales and classical literary works, and the plots and archetypes that come from them.
A fuller treatment of these sources, of the tensions among them, and of the extended quotations on which they rest is given in the section Roots and Branches.
In developing Read, Cut & Film, Liberi Ludi works in dialogue with current European and international practice in children's media education and animation. The method becomes especially relevant in work with children from migrant families.
Since 1995, The Ark has run five-day cut-out stop-motion camps for children aged 8–12. The Ark frames its work as a realisation of the child's right to culture (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 31).
Schoolchildren from France and from partner countries spend a school year making a short film on a set theme, working alongside professional filmmakers. An important European example of structured format: a year-long cycle, a network of schools, the support of specialists, and a final public screening.
Yuri Norshtein (Hedgehog in the Fog, Tale of Tales) is among the most widely recognised animators in the world. His style rests on hand-drawn analogue frame-by-frame work and an auteur's approach.
The "hundred languages of the child" approach of Loris Malaguzzi has been adapted by European schools and cultural centres for work with children from migrant and refugee families in Italy, Sweden and Germany. Animation here serves as an independent means of expression and communication for the child, complementary to the verbal. A migrant child enters the project through a visual and kinetic channel; the work on language is built on top of making, rather than coming before it.
A youth arts centre in Kreuzberg, with a long record of working with adolescents from migrant and refugee families through theatre, film and media. A contemporary European example of an institution in which creative practice becomes an instrument of cultural adaptation.
Examples of systematically organised school-based film and animation programmes.
The foundations of the Read, Cut & Film methodology were tested in pilot groups that included children from migrant families dealing with a sharp change of cultural environment. From this work with the focus groups, the authors reached the following observations:
• A story chosen jointly for discussion and adaptation creates a shared imaginative space in which a child can engage actively without complete command of the language.
• Play — children's work — sharply lowers the threshold for taking part.
• Filming as a group significantly reduces a child's sense of isolation.
• Reassembling a classical plot into a work of one's own gives a sense of control and authorship that turns into a sense of confidence and stays with the child for a long time after the shoot is over.
• Presenting the finished film sharply raises the child's standing within the group and gives them a sense of their own capacity, sharply reducing the sense of discomfort that comes from being in another culture.
The conclusion that follows: Read, Cut & Film can be understood as a form of psychosocial support through creative practice — support offered through making something together.