Young Creatives: Studying My Audience

I started working on Young Creatives, which is basically teaching young people art, in my case I help with the animation course, in University. I did this both for extra cash, as well as to study my audience, since I am making a TV pilot for a kid' show. I've actually had a lot of fun doing this. The kids are fairly well-behaved and fun to work with. There are a lot of varied characteristics among them too. Some of the kids are introverted and work in their own pace, whereas others like to be very vocal about their work. One child in particular is very talented and makes the most depraved and disturbing animations ever (I'm not even kidding, they're practically Eraserhead-esque), and one of the girls makes pretty cute ones, with the occasional violent ones, normally involving cats. She is also very talented in terms how she times the comedic parts.

I haven't seen a single one of these children that are, well as idiotic as people make children out to be. There's actually one kid who's eight years old but still very mature. He's even chosen his religion, and in the latest session, he was actually helping one of the kids out, because he was completely not motivated at all. They all tend to have very dark senses of humour and I do mean all of them. You could go through all of their animations in a row and not find a single one that wasn't in some way tragically humourous. One of my favourite examples was one kid who made up a character specifically to make his life miserable, every step he took. He kept telling me about all of these scenarios in which he seems to triumph but somehow winds up getting a worse deal than ever at the end.

I could go on for hours about the different personality types we get in these courses, but overall my experience has taught me not to hold back too much in terms of my language towards this audience. I can safely say that children are just people and there's no need to patronise them at all.