Creating carnival inspired digital stories with Express Yourself

This summer, young people enrolled on our Express Yourself programme produced a series of fantastic carnival inspired interactive stories. City Arts’ Express Yourself programme offers its participants a safe, creative environment in which to learn new skills and build their confidence.

In the workshops, led by Nicole Solarte-Tobón, the group used open-source software Twine to create their stories. Twine allows you to link together different bits pieces of content and create interactive narratives similar to the text-based adventure games developed in the early days of home computing.

Using the City Arts & Can Samba ‘Flying Free’ troupe for Nottingham Carnival as their inspiration, each of the young participants devised a story and designed and drew its protagonist. The stories are linked throughout this page.

Lydia Tysoe and Sarah Keeton, costume and prop design students from Nottingham Trent University, joined the group for the last day of workshops. They worked with the young people to make fantastic models of their stories’ main characters.

Those models had a starring role in our 2017 carnival troupe, attached to our Parthenon inspired float. After you’ve enjoyed the group’s stories, check out our carnival photo album and see if you can spot them!