Bringing The Vision To Light

By Author: Michael Jackson
Total Articles: 24
Comment this article

Once students pitched a story-board that conveyed their ideas and stayed within budget and time constraints, they were given permission to start filming. Composing with digital media is similar to the writing process in that it is recursive. For the next eight class periods, students were required to shoot, import, and edit their footage into a coherent whole. At any point during the projects students could decide to rewrite, recompose, or recapture.

I do not spend a lot of time walking students through the digital editing suite (we used iMovie). I packaged my minilessons into five-minute segments at the beginning of the class periods in the early stages of the projects. Basically, students need to know how to connect a camera to a computer using a fire wire (IEEE 1394 cable), how to import their footage, how to drag and drop audio Cartier Pasha Replica and video clips, and how to cut a clip, deleting unnecessary parts of shots. These steps can be demonstrated in two five- to eight-minute mini-lessons spanning two days. I also provided quick minilessons on title, effects, and ...
... transitions. I spent slightly more time discussing how to select and import music from Freeplaymusic.com, the premier copyright- and royalty-free music source on the Web. Primarily, however, students learn most of the features of Movie through practice and play. For students, minilessons demonstrate that transitions and effects exist. Experimentation or a quick point-of-need conference will help students achieve the desired effect.
The next eight days of class were meaningful chaos. I was able to witness the early stages of students having "the embodied experience of engaging in purposeful orchestration of modes to create meaning" (Miller 66; italics in original). Students slipped into character. Students brought in props. Students created costumes. One day, while conferencing with a group of students still mired in the late planning stages, I looked over to the other side of the room to discover that some of my linens had been fashioned into togas. (Linens have many uses in a film classroom. They can create a separate area in your room for audio recording, can be used as projection screens, and provide a relatively professional-looking backdrop for interviews.) Another group used Elmo and Oscar the Grouch hand puppets to stage a video reader's theater.

An unanticipated benefit of this project is that students who traditionally sat on the sidelines of class discussions were able to assume larger roles. One particular group of male students appears in some capacity in nearly every film. One student played Oedipus in three separate films, Creon in a fourth, and a Theban citizen in another.

Students moved between shooting and importing and finally came to rest in the editing portion of the project (although a few groups reshot certain portions right up to the last day of working on the project). Each day I shifted Tag Heuer Replica Watches between roles of producer and technical director. As most students are somewhat self-sufficient, I spent the majority of my time demonstrating editing techniques with specific groups at the point of need and handling digital storytelling complications as they arose.