Some of our participants had never opened a video editor before this trip. A few had never travelled abroad for something like it either. Ten days later they came home from a Czech mountain town able to plan a shoot, cut a sequence, and put a real idea behind it.
That is the short version of Tap to Create: a youth exchange on digital content creation, held in Rokytnice nad Jizerou in the Krkonoše mountains of Czechia, with young people from seven countries. Organized under Four Links’ Erasmus+ Accreditation, the activity was co-funded by the European Union. This is the longer version, told through what actually changed.
What They Could Not Do Yet
Picture the group on the first morning: seven nationalities in one room, most of them strangers, plenty of them holding a camera they did not yet know how to use with intent. Our participants had signed up to learn digital content creation, but on day one the only thing anyone was really making was small talk.
So the programme did not rush. The opening days ran on games and team challenges with no equipment in sight, because trust comes before anything worth filming. There were name games like Move Your Name, where each person paired their name with a movement the whole circle copied back, and rounds of Human Bingo that sent everyone hunting the room for someone who matched a clue. The big one was Crazy 50, a fast multinational scavenger hunt of fifty quick tasks scattered around the venue, so contagious that some teams spun up their own Instagram accounts to post the results as they went. Spread across mixed international teams, our participants watched the awkwardness wear off faster than anyone expected.
What Changed
Then the making began, and it built fast. The first tools were about looking: our participants learned to slow down and notice what a photograph was actually doing, how a step to the side or a wait for softer light could change the whole feeling of a frame. What had been point-and-tap turned into something deliberate.
Video came next, and for many it felt daunting at first, since editing software can look like a cockpit of buttons. Nobody was left to sink, though. Teammates leaned over each other’s laptops, swapped shortcuts across four languages, and cheered when a messy pile of clips finally turned into something that held together. There was a whole run of formats to practise on, some serious and some deliberately silly, each one another go at the same handful of skills. Bit by bit the nerves gave way, and our participants went from watching others work to being the ones others turned to.
The Film That Said It Out Loud
Near the end came the exercise everyone remembers. Working in their national groups, each team made a short film about something real from their own country, a problem or a stereotype they wanted to put on screen. After days of light-hearted practice, the tone in the room changed.
Our Lithuanian team chose a hard subject: a child watching home life come apart, the film closing on a line nobody shook off, “I want to be a kid again and be safe in my own home.” It was restrained and careful, the sort of piece that only works when a group trusts one another enough to be honest, and it held its ground beside the films from every other country.
Our Lithuanian team's film, on a child caught in a home coming apart.
Not Every Film Cut So Close
Not everything they made was heavy. Running alongside the national films was a second project: mixed teams inventing a short film of their own and seeing it all the way through, from the first scribbled idea to the final export. Everyone shared the same handful of cameras and laptops, so half the skill was scheduling and the other half was compromise.
The stories went everywhere, from a heist to a comedy to a thriller. One team told a whole tale through FaceTime calls alone, a small misunderstanding between friends that snowballs with every ring, the entire film living on the little rectangle of a phone screen. Lighter in spirit than the national films, but the same craft underneath, and proof our team could steer a full production next to people who had been strangers at the start.
A short film told entirely over FaceTime calls.
The Night We Brought Lithuania to the Mountains
When our turn came to host the evening, we turned a Czech session room into a small corner of Lithuania. The table went yellow, green and red under our flag, and in the middle stood a šakotis, the spiky golden tree cake built up layer by layer over an open flame that first-timers never quite believe is real until they taste it. Around it we laid out gira and food carried from home, then walked the room through where we come from and cleared up a few of the tired assumptions people still bring to a country they have never visited. For one evening the rest of the exchange met Lithuania on our terms, and left with a slice of cake to prove it.
Worth the Road
They came back with real skills, but also with something harder to measure: friends now scattered across seven countries, and the steady confidence that comes from making something good and watching a room react to it. Several kept the momentum going at home, showing the project and their films to classmates and neighbours.
For a young person in Lithuania, an experience like this cracks open a side of Europe that rarely comes knocking on its own. Ours went looking for it, and carried it back.
Photo Gallery
A few more moments from this activity :)
Check these and more photos in the activity’s photo album.
