Wednesday, 8 August 2007

Year 6 Film Project 2007

This year we ran a transitional Literacy Project between all of the feeder schools and our Local Comprehensive School ( High School). Our oldest pupils (Year 6 - aged 10-11), worked on the project producing a variety of presentations.
The project had just finished when a small group of pupils who are involved in some of my digital media work approached me with a film project based on the book Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti.
They had a very clear idea of how they wanted the film to look, in the event we only had lunch time in which to squeeze in rehearsals, shooting, cutting, editing and post production. They were an excellent group to work with - in fact they only needed a quick 'how to' on iMovie and they were away.
We had as you expect in a film many hurdles to overcome - one for me was supervision, I had to be on hand just to know where they were and what they were doing ( at all times - school policy ). One of their problems was the variable weather that we had through May and June, so continuity became an issue.
Thier technical skills improved hugely during the project, from learning how to shoot scenes avoiding huge waste and re-shoots, to adding post production sound ( we have a group of pupils now who would make good Foley Artists - they taught me some things as well which was excellent :).
Their final piece of work was shown at their End of Year Presentation Awards and the Director, Producer and main driving force behind the film rightly became our first "Young FilmMaker of the Year".


* After filming and DVD making I made the fatal error of deleting the working files from the film !!!!! I then had no way of converting the file for upload - Step in the EduBloggersphere - thanks to David Warlick who posted my a link to a conversion download Handbrake which having used I would recommend you to download ( one for the Toolbox - you never know when you may need it.)
Apologies for the quality of the final project - the DVD is 350MB while the Blip.TV file is 53MB hence there is bound to be a loss of quality, I hope that this doesn't spoil your enjoyment of the film.

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