Welcome to another Youth Space blog post, the first one of 2023! We hope you all had a lovely end to 2022 and are having a fantastic start to this year. Before we talk about the exciting year ahead let's talk all things Halloween and Christmas!
Halloween
It’s common knowledge that Nick is a Halloween superfan so it was only right he took over our social media for the month of October! We had spooky quizzes and spooky Music Mondays but the main event for us was the staff haunted night! Nick took us to Dunino Den which has a very haunted history! I feared I wouldn’t make it home alive and did say my goodbyes to my family before I left. Let's hear what Nick has to say for himself…
It was great to be able to do a full month social media take over for Halloween. The young people provided some amazing art work which really celebrated their love of the ghoulish time of year. One of the highlights of the takeover involved a haunted visit to the Den in Dunino, and to be honest I was a little nervous beforehand about potentially traumatising my co workers; however the team were very brave and survived. In all seriousness it is such a unique location within Fife I would say visit in the daytime to truly take in the sights it has to offer.
Murder Mystery
We also held our first murder mystery event at the Woodside centre in Glenrothes! It was very well planned out by our online creators and everyone came in full costume and committed to their roles (some very impressive southern American accents). Poor Nick was the murder victim and it was a very intense time trying to track down our murderer!
The Crime Scene!
Taster Sessions in Kennoway
After the Halloween rush was over we continued our weekly taster sessions in Kennoway making our murder mystery short film. It was such a passionate group of young people and their ideas were never-ending which was amazing to see, it was a totally youth led project from the plot right down to the filming! We’d love to do something like this again in the future.
Christmas
Then before we knew it, it was that time again… CHRISTMAS!! Anyone who knows me knows I thrive on good old christmas spirit and was so excited for a month of Christmas content. A highlight for me is always the staff quiz and this year we included our managers George and Tricia to heighten the competition! I was hoping the team would redeem themselves this year after their poor attempts at the Christmas film quizzes on Instagram, however, it was our manager George that turned out to be the Christmas expert, he won by an absolute landslide! It was also great having Nick’s help with this Christmas campaign, his editing and animation skills came in very handy, over to Nick again to tell you more!
As ever it is great to collaborate with Clare on social media projects, we planned most of the material a couple months in advance. Inspired by making the most of a snow day, myself and Ben went out filming a series of Christmas cracker jokes. It was amazing the amount of impressive snow people created in Magdalen Green in Dundee, the Wallace and Gromit figures were particularly impressive.
I particularly enjoyed putting together a stop motion animation as a Christmas card thank you to the Lomond Centre and our volunteers. Claymation is a lot of fun to animate and look forward to a future project where I can share my passion for the medium.
Creators
After a year of BIG themes and with the festive season fast approaching we took a more ‘relaxed’ stance on our next theme with half of our usual sessions (eight down to four sessions) and asked the YP what we can do related to Christmas in a short time.
The idea of making a production came up, lots of different ideas were suggested like ‘An Alternative Nativity’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’ parody but talk of a family dinner gone wrong won the vote and a xmas film trailer was to be made!
We discussed characters they could all play with some portraying children, some gender reversals, distant relatives and of course the youth workers were made the old grandparents. We made props including decorations, a paper mache turkey and fake presents.
It was a general chaos but lots of fun and the YP really enjoyed it (especially the cream) .The spontaneity and improv was hilarious and you can watch the end product below!
D&D
Passing over to Nick again to update you all on our D&D group, despite how long it’s been going on it still goes right over my head…
Our Dungeons and Dragons campaign continues to have everyone guessing what will happen next. We long ago left the skies having been passengers on the Airship Darude, which was boarded by pirates and would eventually come crashing to the ground. Our party then went on to travel to Bigg City. Within Bigg City the party became entangled with a fugitive blamed for the Airship disaster. Before the party knew it they were labelled public enemies but you should believe everything you read in a newspaper.
The city provided many twists and turns with rival guilds, a gladiatorial event, a political campaign; a changeling spy to name and a bounty hunter. Things really came to head when an all powerful soul crystal was used to power a giant stone golem which brought destruction to the city. Our party then went on to search for the soul crystal at the bottom of Sapphire Lake. The Soul Crystal has the potential to restore the health of the populous of the under bigg after an experiment transformed them long ago into slug people. The expedition under water was a challenging one that resulted in the death of Norb Dylan (Worker Ben's character), there was also betrayal and destruction of a luxury submarine, the adventure continues.
That's us all caught up on the last few months, now we’re in the midst of planning for all things summer!
Summer last year was jam packed and we managed to go on so many great trips so we can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in the works for this year.
Until next time! - The Youth Space gang
