Movie Making with P6/5
As part of the current remit, I have been taking a P6/5 class for ICT, providing McCrone cover for the class teacher. There’s been a big push for the Scottish Homecoming to be marked in the school, and it has been quite positive all round – it seems, at least, a step further than forced Burns recitals and such; and the idea of embracing our collective Scottishness has been well received by teachers; and by pupils too, I think.
As part of this, I had the idea that it would be a nice idea to explore this in ICT lessons too. My initial plan was to have the children in the class gather images that define Scottishness to them; I would then have them load the images into Animoto and make a slideshow. While I was playing around with Animoto myself, I had cause to think about what music I would use as a soundtrack to the slideshow. I could download something, maybe let the children choose a song and have the MP3 available in the school’s shared directory for them to upload. But then, it hit me that while the whole school is preparing songs to sing at an assembly, it would be worthwhile to record the class singing their songs and have that as the soundtrack. I thought that it would be a nice idea also, to film the recording of the songs to make a Band Aid style video to open or close the project.
Of course, with that thought, I had let the cat out of the bag. Since I want to film some of it, it would be pointless not filming the rest of it! Maybe it would be an equally good idea then, to have the children talking on camera about their feelings about Scotland and what defines it for them. The idea was born then, for the children in the class to make a short film called ‘My Scotland’. In it, I aim to gather a collection of interviews with pupils (across the whole school) and members of the wider school and local community (touching on Enterprise), still images selected (or better, taken) by pupils in the class, the class singing and my living out my rock and roll dreams with a lilting guitar strum in the background.
I would like the children to be as responsible as possible for the production of the entire thing. The school only has access to Windows Movie Maker on its computers, which I don’t have much experience with. Not having a Windows machine at home, I’m loathe to try it in school, especially with the restrictive network lockdown meaning that I’d be unlikely to make any sort of camera work with it without calling in the IT guy. Easier, I think to let the children use my Macbook (in a very strictly supervised way, you understand!) and we can edit the piece on iMovie instead. I’d like the class to script it, make up interview questions and carry out the interviews; be responsible for setting up the tripod and operating the camera – especially since I won’t be around much of the time bar Tuesday afternoons, they’re going to have to be able to work on this independently as much as possible.
I rolled the notion out to the class this afternoon and they seemed quite excited about it. We discussed things that the children might want to see in their film, and we made a basic mindmap on the board. I had hoped to make it on mind42.com but there were some technical issues with regard to getting the whiteboard to work, so once again, analog technology saved the day! We talked about the types of jobs that we would need to do and I was pleased to get a few volunteers to be writers, and completely unsurprised to see that everyone wanted to be a camera operator. It was decided that everyone had to get a shot of doing that!
Finally, the children had to receive ‘the talk’ about the value of school equipment and looking after it, after a little bit of silliness resulted in the tripod taking a dunt while the children where around it and I was pointing out the features of the camera. Understandable really, I think they were quite excited; and they’re not really used to seeing that sort of thing in their classroom. The fine line between excited curiosity and ‘being a bit silly’ got a little blurred. I always feel that I don’t want to start a project off with a threat; so I look on it as more of a general reminder about the value and importance of mutual trust between pupil and teacher when it comes to tasks like this one.