Welcome back once again to my Digital Technologies reflective blog. Well done for powering through and making it this far. Hopefully you are enjoying reading my blog as much as I enjoy writing it. This week’s post will be a little bit shorter than the rest due to circumstances I shall explain shortly.

This week we were doing stop-motion animation part 2, a continuation from last week. The task was to produce a longer stop-motion animation which depicted a short story, a natural disaster or a mathematical problem. However as this was not an assessment task, so I took this opportunity to create my previously missed iMovie project on internet safety.

This blog post will talk further about how iMovie was used to create and edit my short internet safety film. So, what did I do? How easy was it to create? And is it something that could be done in a class? Don’t worry all shall be discovered, with a slight recap on my week 6 blog on the value movie making to young learners. Do enjoy.

The briefing for this task instructed to use iMovie as the editing software, however I don’t personally own any apple devices, which meant that I didn’t have any access to the iMovie software outside the university. Instead I used the “Windows movie maker” software as I have windows pc’s and I still came out with a very good result. I wasn’t sure at first if this would go against me, but I was informed that the lesson was to use an editing software to produce a short film. The iMovie software was recommended as that is available in the university’s facilities, however any other equivalent software was still suitable providing the task was completed to suit the outcomes.

As I was the only person who missed this input, I was somewhat at an immediate disadvantage I felt. I only had myself to work with so I couldn’t really film a live action film if the only cast and crew member was me. Without a team I only had my own ideas, I didn’t have someone to offer a counter proposal or develop my ideas. I had no crew to help share the work of editing meaning that all of the editing fell onto my shoulders, as well as the filming, directing and producing.

These issues made the task immediately more difficult, but I did not give in. Instead of a live action film I brought out the bendy people again and reused some of my previously learned stop motion animation skills. I was able to process and adapt my own ideas successfully to produce, in my opinion, a decent short film by constantly questioning my ideas and asking myself “is there a different way I can show this?”. Some of my ideas I had from the beginning and kept them as I first imagined all the way through the process. Whereas some ideas I came up with in the process of carrying out other ideas. Throughout the process I had a clear visual of where I wanted to take my film and how I wanted to tell the story to make a clear teaching and learning point.

Editing the film took a long time, partially due to the afore mentioned fact that it was just myself doing the editing, but since there was no physically filmed footage to put together, the film was primarily images. This meant that almost the entire film making process for me was just editing. It took me a full two weeks to edit the film, twice as long as the other teams, however it was not a competition and I still managed to complete the task to a high standard.

The film follows the story of one bendy person who shared all his personal information online on social media platforms. This led him to get into some problems with some unwanted interest from someone pretending to be someone who they are not. After telling the story of the character named Ryan, the film then moves onto the story of another bendy person who is very internet smart and keeps all her personal information a secret, I named this character Cassy. Cassy too gets some unwanted attention from the same person who spoke to Ryan, except Cassy handles the issue very differently from Ryan.

Throughout the film there are comments made which highlight what each character is doing right and wrong, these are to keep the audience informed of what is happening in each story and to plant the proverbial seed of how to conduct oneself on the internet. There are also some very clear key messages throughout the film which make explicitly clear to the viewer what not to do on the internet.

From the beginning of the task I knew that I wanted my film set to a piece of music. I knew exactly which piece I wanted and decided that the pictures would run in time to the music. The piece of music I used was “Nuvole Bianche” by Ludovico Einaudi. This is a favourite piece of piano music for me and I adapted the story to fit with the cadences of the music. This timing was a precise art which added to the time it took me to edit the film. This did result in the editing to become rather tedious at times however, the final result made this frustration worth it as the film has the visually and emotionally artistic effects I was aiming for.

I was intending for the music to enhance the story, starting light hearted and easy going. As drama unfolds in the story the music intensifies adding a sense of suspense and strong emotion. Then when things in the story return to calm, so too does the music become once again light hearted. The ending features some clear internet rules and the music fades out with a peaceful cadence to give the rules their dramatic stance and leave the audience feeling a sense of being on a journey.

Short films can be good at engaging young learners with their favourite characters, this can allow them to relate to their stories and learn from their experiences. Furthermore, a class project on making a short film can expand the learner’s knowledge in multiple areas as well as develop their skills and learn brand new skills in the process.

Please accept my apologies reader, I anticipated this post to be much shorter than this, do enjoy my internet safety short film.

[Click Here] to watch my short film on YouTube.

Signing off.