Day 7 Part II

I was a bit worried about letting my 7th period class out to film today because of all the problems that we have in the classroom, but it wasn't as bad as I was planning on it being.

For my film classes today they had to film a nursery rhyme and use the angles that they just learned (at least 12 of the 24 that they have) and they had to be creative about it. It'll be interesting to see what they end up doing. I have all the tapes and I'm going to watch them over the weekend and then show them in class on Monday. I'm not grading that harsh on this project because in all honesty I haven't even taught them how to use the camera yet; I just really wanted to see if they could figure it out and for the most part they did. I did have a few students come back to me and say that they can't figure out why the camera isn't recording and I had to ask them if they remembered to put the tape in the camera. Their faces were really interesting after that. "Mrs. Z, how come there is a red flashing symbol on the camera? We can't get it to record!" I gave them a little more than an hour to get everything done, which was enough time to film a 1 minute segment and use the angles. You wouldn't believe the complaining that I got from all of them. "1 minute?! I can't do 1 minute!" but then at the end when I asked them about it, most said that they filled up the 1 minute rather quickly.

I'm thinking that the next thing I want to do with the film kids is talk about lighting. One thing I want to do is use some of those "special features" that come on DVDs that talk about different aspects of that particular film, but I can't find any segments on lighting. Anyone have any suggestions? I mean, I can just sit up there and talk about lighting and show little clips of films that have good/bad lighting in them (anyone have any suggestion on that?) but I think they would like something else besides that.

My multimedia class tomorrow is going to be a pain. I'm trying to figure out what next to teach them in photoshop, but I can't figure out what would be a good fit. Ugg. And I have Back to School night tonight, so I've got to come up with something for that. We'll see how that goes.