Concept

Susanne P. Radtke

This intercultural workshop continues the joint exchange with our partner university ISI Yogyakarta. This year, an additional partner university -- the TEI of Athens, Greece --participated for the first time. The workshop was conducted at the Ulm University of Applied Sciences Ulm, Digital Media program, for 4 and a half days followed by a 6-day excursion to Dessau (Bauhaus) and Berlin.

The participants from ISI Yogyakarta consisted of three students and one lecturer. The TEI of Athens attended with 2 students and 2 lectures who specialize in animation. Along with eleven students from Ulm University of Applied Sciences, three intercultural teams took part in the intercultural workshop. All names are shown here.

Three different countries worked together in this workshop and used three different alphabets: Javanese, Greek and Latin alphabet. We are familiar with the Greek alphabet and use it in mathematics, physics and other sciences-based fields but the ancient Javanese alphabet is less known. It contributes to the animation with interesting letters having a handwriting character.

The first day of the workshop provided the following lectures: theoretical background of the intercultural design workshops, process in 2D-animation, criteria of 2D-animation and 3D-animation, Javanese script and video mapping. This scholarly input was essential since the students had to expand their technical skills as well as their knowledge of the Javanese alphabet.

The topic “Bi- and Trilingual Proverbs” offered the students a wide range of experiences and discussions since proverbs are very rich in illustrating the cultural backgrounds they come from. They often refer to daily life, myths and legends of the region or country the come from. To understand the deeper meaning of these proverbs, the students had to deal with the cultures of their co-students. By using creativity methods like brainstorming, mind-mapping and discussion, they developed ideas, identified the keywords of the proverb and started storyboarding. A mid-workshop design crtitique helped the students to adjust their design approaches and made them aware of their own development. In the last phase of the workshop, the teams worked on their final designs and audio-recordings, and showed their work in a public final presentation at the university.

Susanne P. Radtke