workshop musing

I've gotten a little done on the movie. It's tough finding time. On a more positive note, I have done some planning for my upcoming 3-day moviemaking workshop in March. A number of teachers have expressed interest, both teachers at the school and some from other schools.

This has led me to another idea. There are a number of teachers in my county who have been to one of my introduction to moviemaking workshops. But I think relatively few of them have actually took the final step and done a student movie project.

We have workday coming up at the end of March. I'm thinking about doing an all-day or half-day workshop on making a class project. It would be only for people who have had a moviemaking class or feel confident in their skills. The idea would be to spend the entire time working on a lesson or unit plan incorporating movie making. We would do everything from the initial idea to rubrics and 5-point lesson plans. I would also be able to incorporate the inventories I am working on of what each school has. This will help the teachers make a plan that uses what they already have.

I'm off to pitch this idea to a few teachers and see what they think.

Update

Whoops, a few days late on the entry. Things have been busy.

I've been to a few schools and I've started to inventory their moviemaking tools.

I've also done some planning for my introductory movie but I haven't gotten time to do any filming with kids. I can hopefully start this this week or next.

On a very positive note, I found out that I have access to some powerful moviemaking tools. My tech director and I were trying to convert a movie from quicktime to WMV and called ITS. They let us know that our CTE department had purchased 500 licesnses to Adobe CS4 creative suite. This is a huge package including premiere pro movie editing software and aftereffects post production software. Best yet, we have 50 teacher at-home licenses. I've already installed it and started teaching myself to use it. I am more familiar with the elements version which is simpler, so it's a bit of a stretch, but it is working out well.

Finally, I am beginning to plan a three-day movie making workshop for March with elementary teachers. More on that next time.

Celluloid Evangalism

Okay, here's an idea.

One of the problems I have had getting overworked teachers to integrate moviemaking into their curriculum is that they have a hard time justifying such an involved and (seemingly) complex project into their busy class schedules. What I need is an attention getter. Since I am arguing that film is a good attention getter, I should really make a film.

So one part of this project is now going to be putting together a short documentary-style film about how kids are learn from movies. I'm thinking of it as mainly students telling about their favorite movies and what they learned by watching them I can also get some interview clips of kids who have made movies and find out what they learned.

In other project news I have started working on my inventory of availiable equipment. More on that later.