Transforming Your Classroom Into a Hollywood Studio

Transforming Your Classroom Into A Hollywood Studio

By Azul Terronez
February 27, 2009

High Tech Middle

INT. CLASSROOM-DAY

We are well on our way through the first phase of our project. The One Minute movie project will be done filming today....well that's what the schedule says but you know how filming goes. I was impressed with the students initial story brainstorms and scripts. They were surprised when I made them do several revisions for story and then again for format. Often writing teams had 5 drafts of their one or two page script. Students often take shortcuts when it comes to story boarding because they want to rush and film. The teams that took their time to storyboard each shoot had much better success. Not only in the amount of time it too to shoot, but staying true to the story. I think allowing each student to make a short film before we launch a larger project was a good idea. Students' talents and interest are being revealed.
The next phase of the movie project is editing and titling their one minute movies, which seems to be going well, but technology can always sneak up on you and steal away your work!!! Our deadline for completed films is next week, which will make it three weeks since we started the project. We will have a class film festival to screen the movies and nominations just like the academy awards for different categories.
We have written drafts of student biographies for the book and also began writing the roles of film production. Some of the writing is decent and will be used for the book. Others will be used to build the knowledge of film production.
I will need to assign different students teams to begin writing each chapter. For example, someone will write a chapter called, "Storyboard Art-Directing with a Pencil" I am still have to think of all of the catchy titles, I will have students do that.