The Build Up to Our Film Festival Entry 2019.mov

Direct Instruction

This page shows the build up to our class entry into the Manaiakalani Film Festival for 2019.

It shows me introducing my idea to the class and the discussion we had around the story, before moving onto illustrating our backgrounds, deciding on roles and storyboarding.

A supplementary video is included further down the page to show us revisiting our almost-finished movie, in an attempt to improve it and 'Finish it Off Properly'.

Extended Lesson Plan

Reflection

It is hard to capture the whole process of making a film on camera as it occurs over multiple days and weeks, often squeezed into extra spaces as they occur in our timetable. While this footage was filmed in Term 3, it has taken a lot of time to piece together, and I feel it sits better attached to Term 4 of my page, as Term 4 is when we get to share it with the world at the Manaiakalani Film Festival, when our whole school (of 600 students,) travels to the cinema at Sylvia Park to see themselves on the big screen.

Despite the content of the movie being a teacher selected text, I am happy with the level of engagement and buy-in evident in the students' conversations around the story. Many of the children felt the context of a Pacific Island setting connected with them, and wished to identify as Tongan (even knowing they came from another Pacific Island) for the duration of our filming.

There was a great amount of literacy learning involved in the production of our movie. Discussions around characters, setting and sequencing events are an obvious learning experience. Thinking about dialogue and how to present that dialogue to tell the story was a good challenge for my actors and narrator. As you will hear in the video, it also provided a writing topic for the class, as will the Film Festival itself. I will attach a selection of their blog posts about the event, after it has occurred.

Unfortunately, you will see that the finished product has some technical problems at times. I used the camera I was provided with for filming my Class On Air episodes, and it has a tendency to lose focus halfway through a scene. Due to attendance and timetabling issues it was too hard to reshoot every scene that this occurred in.

I will attach the movie under 'Learner Generated Content' when it is publicly available on the day of the Manaiakalani Film Festival 2019 - the 13th of November.