Living Legends is an intergenerational project that stimulates interaction between oral history and digital culture. It is centered on the mapping and the illustration of oral history considering the wisdom and knowledge of elders, often expressed as myths and legends traditionally told in European countries and around the world. Our project gives a voice to young people from different cultural backgrounds and teaches them to tell the stories of their communities in a contemporary way. Through a training of animation techniques, the participants learn how to illustrate and save the memory of their people using digital tools of artistic expression. Living legends is an exchange between actors in the field of youth working with participative video and fostering the use of audio-visual media in non-formal education all over Europe and beyond. It aims to improve general access to media and to improve media literacy in rural areas. At the same time Living Legends gives a voice to both, the young and the old, and helps creating a bridge between generations and cultures. The project wants to make a positive change in terms of interaction between different generations of the community, in order to built a more harmonious and respectful relationship with each other. New technologies and media do not have to cause a loss of culture or a distance between generations, but they are tools, that when used correctly, create benefits and can be a source of conservation, dialogue, information and creation. The project addresses the needs of the younger generation to develop media literacy and digital competences and teaches a creative approach using free applications. It also addresses the needs of the organizations to embed digital youth work in their strategy and vision. The methodology has been developed in an Erasmus+ capacity building youth project with an international team in 2017. With this follow up project and a new partner consortium we want to achieve our goal, to disseminate the idea and the methods all over Europe and beyond. Therefore, we plan a best practice exchange with new partners, in order to share the methodology and to empower their facilitators to go on and apply it in their own workshops. Vice versa we hope to learn some of their best practice and to implement it in the project.
The main objective of implementing the project was to interchange methodologies in youth work and media literacy with other organizations of the same field within Europe. We wrote the project as a follow-up project of Living Legends, which was funded by Erasmus+ in 2017. The methodology we developed with our partner organizations was working quite well in our follow-up local projects, so we intended to widen theiInternational partner network in order to multiply the method to other European regions. We chose the partners because we could imagine further cooperation but also because we could imagine well that they could work with our method in future projects. The aim of the Living Legends methodology is to collect local stories and to transform them into animation films. The more regions in the world will participate or cooperate, the more stories will appear on our virtual map and in the digital archive. Also we want to empower youth workers to use digital tools and in specific animation film in youth work.
The motivation to apply for the project was to continue our long term project idea of gathering local stories and legends around the world and turn them into animated movies, enhancing an exchange between youth and the senior generations. Our idea was to train new multiplicators in order to enable them to realise those kind of workshops themselves in their region and to use digital media and animation film as a tool, in their youth work. We were also very interested in getting to know new partners and establishing new connections and cooperations for later-on projects.