What Makes a Home?
Exploring home, creativity and belonging through art and film
What Makes a Home? brought children and young people together to explore a deceptively simple question: what makes somewhere feel like home?
The project began with creative workshops in local primary schools, where children explored ideas around home, place, people, memories and belonging through art and making. These ideas then continued into an intensive week of creativity, storytelling and filmmaking, giving young people the opportunity to explore the theme through a different creative lens.
Working collaboratively, participants learned new skills, shared their own perspectives and helped shape what they wanted to create and say — culminating in a film and shared celebration of the project.
Details
PROJECT: What Makes a Home?
WHEN: August 2026
WHO: Children & young people
WHERE: Chipping Norton
CREATIVE FOCUS: Film, storytelling & creative exploration
PARTNERS: Chipping Norton Theatre, Chipping Norton Community Land Trust & Film Oxford
FINALE: Community film screening
About Us
Exploring What Home Means
The project began with children from Holy Trinity and St Mary’s primary schools, using art, making and conversation to explore what home meant to them.
There wasn't one right answer. Home could be a building, but it could also be people, memories, safety, favourite things or simply somewhere you feel you belong.
Through creative activities, including playful junk modelling using cardboard and recycled materials, children were encouraged to imagine, experiment and create without fixed plans or rules. Their individual artwork also came together to create a travelling quilt, bringing lots of different ideas about home into one shared piece.
From an Idea to Film
The project then continued through an intensive creative film week, giving another group of young people the opportunity to explore the same themes through storytelling and filmmaking.
Working with Jason of Firefly Studios, participants developed their ideas, learned filmmaking skills and worked together to create their own film — keeping young people's voices and perspectives at the heart of the process.
The different strands of What Makes a Home? came back together for the community screening on 28 August 2026, celebrating the film alongside artwork created through the wider project.
More Than a Finished Film
The value of the project wasn't simply in producing a film.
It was in giving young people the time, materials and support to explore a subject that means something different to everyone; to experiment with new ways of expressing themselves; and to experience what can happen when individual ideas become a shared creative project.
For Bumble Creatives, projects like What Makes a Home? are also part of a wider commitment to creating opportunities for children and young people to have their ideas taken seriously and to participate in ambitious creative experiences.
Working Together
What Makes a Home? was developed collaboratively with Chipping Norton Theatre and Chipping Norton Community Land Trust, with filmmaking expertise from Jason of Firefly Studios.
It is one of the ways Bumble Creatives works beyond its regular programmes, collaborating with other organisations and creative practitioners to develop projects shaped around particular communities, places and ideas.
