WHAT IF?! animals and humans switch roles

At the beginning of March class teacher Ms. Lenzi gave the whole class the task to develop a project about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SSG). Early ideas ranged from recycling plastic by collecting the tops of bottles to using stationary bikes to reduce the use of electricity in schools. In the end the class decided to do this by using a stop-motion animation with clay to depict the way animals treated today. By creating a video and share it with other people, the children wanted to not just spread the word but also show how horrible this treatment actually is.

To help everybody to understand the degree of this abuse, they decided that their video "What if? – animals and humans switch roles" should take place in a different world, where animals take the places of humans, and humans the ones of animals. They used clay to form the characters, came up with different scenarios, and picked three which were transformed into scenes that approached the themes of the video from different points of view. Ideas that didn´t make the cut were: politics with animals, using human skin as a replacement for leather, humans getting injected hormones to make them grow faster and the use of artificial colours and aromas to make them look and taste better. The three scenarios the children did turn into scenes were about fishing humans, milking humans and a human zoo.

The ultimate goal of the project was to redirect the common sympathy for humans towards animals by switching the roles of everyday interactions between – to make others understand what the (ab)use by human really looks like for of animals.

The main contributors and contributions during the project were:

Anna: Clay & created the fish scene

Jostein: helped with creating the cow scene

Kai: created figures, filmed the cow scene, and edited

Ginevra: main writer of the description

Andrej: Co-writer

Cathie: filmed the gorilla scene, created figures, documented ideas