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For the past 10 years, at the Cité-des-jeunes de Vaudreuil, comic books from here and elsewhere have had great allies to advertise them: trailers created by students with various digital tools under the guidance of passionate teachers. We discussed the project with educational consultant Michaël Grégoire.

A French teacher for 24 years and now a pedagogical advisor at the Centre de services scolaires des Trois-Lacs, Michaël Grégoire launched 10 years ago the BA/BD project. The objective is as follows: to get the students to immerse themselves in selected illustrations from a comic strip and to remix them in the form of a trailer based on their own subjectivity or felt emotion. This leads them to give free rein, for nearly three minutes, to their sometimes breathtaking creativity. Ultimately, the trailer should make other students want to read the selected works.

Michaël Grégoire is used to telling students, "With your tablet or your cell phone, you can do anything, not just consume, but also create. Students learn to use programs like iMovie, but there are others that they themselves manage to discover," says Grégoire.

The trailer/comic book (BA/BD) project is divided into a few major steps: 

1. The reading of a comic strip, selected from a corpus of more than 25 comics from here and abroad (e.g. Paul dans le Nord by Michel Rabagliati, La fille invisible by Émilie Villeneuve and Julie Rocheleau, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi).
2. Writing, including storyboarding that will lead to the production of a film, which can be done with real actors or in the form of an animated film, and the justification of the process, i.e. why the students chose such and such a shot to illustrate one or more panels of their comic strip.
3. The production of the trailer itself.
4. The presentation of the final product. 

The project is carried out over a period of two months individually or in teams of two or three people. Conquered by the passion and the impulse of the pedagogical advisor, four teachers are now part of the project.

A creative approach that appeals to students

Not only does the BA/BD project allow for a better understanding of the language of comics and a deeper understanding of its structure, such as the contribution of the ellipsis to the narrative content, but it also appears to be very motivating for the students who participate. 

That's the case for Aadhvy Thilagaraj, a Secondary 5 student, who was in Mr. Gregoire's class. "In French, we always expect written or oral projects, but with a project like this, it's completely different. With the trailer, you have to be able to create an atmosphere, to look for music, in short to find an emotion in a scene," explains the student who used The Hunting Accident, an American graphic story by David Carlson and Landis Blair. On the techno side, although she admits she's not too techno, Aadhvy readily admits to learning new features by using IMovie.

Presentation of the final product

Her colleague Sara Hamadache, whose trailer was inspired by author Mélanie Leclerc's Contacts, says she didn't have too much trouble choosing the shots and justifying them: "Isn't a picture worth a thousand words? There is no doubt that for her, too, it was the creative aspect that was the heart of her approach. She was in Philippe Crête's class, one of the four teachers involved in the project.

The project also motivates teachers. Mr. Crête believes that BA/BD appeals to both boys and girls and that it also allows teams "to develop their autonomy. Such a project also provides an opportunity to hone the cinematic eye of those born with a screen in hand.

For Michaël Grégoire, when faced with the results obtained, "we are always very impressed. With BA/BD, we literally open the floodgates of creativity.

You can check out the LAByrinthethe Quebec virtual laboratory for digital publishing and education, to discover two selected works from the project.

In addition, you can read project overviewspecially adapted for École branchée by M. Grégoire.