Today, Our North Rhins Pupils became movie makers courtesy of the Scottish Youth Film Foundation (SYFF). Scott Mackay & Belle Doyle travelled down from West Lothian to deliver an outreach workshop for our Primary 6 and 7 pupils.
The outreach project target young people who would not normally have the opportunity and resources to make a film. Scott and Belle helped the children to analyse films and learn how films work. We then moved on to develop a story through teaching them the roles required to produce a film. With a script written, our group was cast and acted and recorded the film themselves to create the end film product.
Linking across the primary curriculum, the workshop unlocks the literacy of films and teaching the children to be able to ‘read’ and ‘write’ films using the resources we have available in our classrooms.
Scott and Belle informed us that every film must have the following 3C’s and 3’S:
- Colour, character & camera
- Story, setting & sound
We analysed a scene from Star Wars and came up with our own observations:
We moved on to consider the character of Darth Vader. We were able to recognise his physical features and his personality. We also identified that, although he may, at first appear evil, he has redeeming features too e.g. his love for his son, Luke in the film. We selected a character of our own and repeated this character analysis, sharing our work.
Next up was spotting shots breaks in films to help us structure our film sequence:
- Establishing shot e.g. outside school
- Wide shot
- Inside shot – long shot – full length
- Mid shot – e.g. conversation
- Close up – to show some emotions on faces
- Extreme close up – at a height looking down on a character to make them look smaller
- Eye level –
- Low angle – will make the character look bigger
- Worms eye view – very low down
We split into groups to identify what kind of shot example images on the screen were.
Working together in teams to build the skills for life, learning and work, the teams created a story board to depict an emotion word in 5 mixed shots. We then split into the roles of Director, Camera person & Actors to film our scenes in different takes.
Next up, we learned the skills of editing our scenes together to create our short films. Some moved on to add music and credits too! Unfortunately, we ran out of time and didn’t get to put that final polish onto our creations, but you can certainly see clearly the skills the children demostrated. There is so much scope for future projects with the digital skills we learned today.
There was an opportunity to build and maintain social connections at break times too 🙂
Our grateful thanks to both Scott and Belle for travelling all this way and giving freely of their time.
# Successful Learners
