Wolves at the Door
We are a group of 6 pupils who were invited to take part in a gifted and talented writing project and we became known as Wolves at the Door. This was organised by dedicated adults such as our teachers and people from Cornwall County Council. It included other year 9 gifted and talented writers from Restormel schools to be gathered in one place practising and improving our writing skills.
This opportunity included going to the Lost Gardens of Heligan with a professional writer, Anna Murphy. It was good to share our ideas with other students from other local schools such as Roseland, Penair and Brannel who we all got on well with. We studied many techniques in writing like kennings, group names for objects and many others. We wrote plenty of stories and undertook a few activities, such as walking through Heligan and writing about what we saw. It soon emerged that our group was clearly more into the comedy aspect than the rest!!
In addition to the two days spent at Heligan, we also spent a day at the West Briton offices in Truro. Here we viewed the newsrooms and saw how a newspaper was put together. We then did a variety of activities. Some conducted interviews with members of the public whilst others interviewed people in an old people’s home to gather information for an article each; the theme was Valentines Day. This was then published in the paper.
Another opportunity led to us going to Falmouth University for filming a script we had written. This was very ambitious and exciting and involved a lot of group work across the four schools and lots of cooperation. We were all given a traditional Cornish myth and had to work out how to modernise it. Once we had the 1st draft of the script, we met the actors and spent a day editing the script. The following week we got to film it at Falmouth University! This was very exciting and interesting because we were put in change of cameras and we were directing the actors! It took almost two days to film yet the actual film itself will only be 12 minutes long! It will be premiering at the Truro film centre on the 19th July.
In addition to having a film made and our work published in a newspaper, we have produced postcards of our best work from the Heligan sessions with Anna Murphy. These postcards can be purchased from any one of the Wolves who are Patrick Wilson, Matt Booth, Corey Koppelow, Ryan Daly, Liam Ettenfield and Daniel Hodgkiss.
We all realise this was a great opportunity and we feel really privileged to have been a part of it.