Tom Barrance

Elephant

2011-12-16T12:18:00.000-08:00

I haven't managed to catch all of The Story of Film but the 90s one was fascinating, particularly the interviews with Baz Luhrmann and Gus van Sant. Van Sant was particularly illuminating about the genesis of his Columbine-based film Elephant, and was frank about the inspiration it took from Alan Clarke's film of the same name about sectarian killings in Northern Ireland. Van Sant's Elephant came in for criticism from US commentators who objected to the idea of making an arthouse film about a high school massacre. I went to a BFI Easter School in Belfast, several years before the Good Friday agreement, where Danny Boyle - then an unknown, but actually the BBC producer who first had the idea for Clarke's Elephant - showed the film, and it came in for a lot of criticism from Northern Ireland teachers who made similar criticisms.

L'arroseur arrosé

2011-11-25T05:55:00.000-08:00

I quite often use this as the basis for a storyboarding exercise. 'The sprinkler sprinkled' is the first ever fiction film, and the first ever film comedy, made by the Lumiere brothers in 1895.

I quite like this piece by Laurence Price which was for a while the main description of the film on iMDB:

"L'Arroseur Arrosé is a cry from the depths of the proletariat for social emancipation, whereby the disenfranchised masses represented in a life-justifying performance as the Boy can only find justice through subversion and revolution. Indeed, the conclusion of this epic drama can been seen as a confirmation of the inherent violence in a Hegelian dialectic of class conflict; the chilling figure of the Gardener (a possible reference to ecclesiastical authority?) viciously suppresses the rights of the Boy to self-expression. The perennial nature of this conflict is undermined when both parties rush out of the "garden"; no resolution is possible except mutual annihilation."

Soundtrack

2011-11-25T05:44:00.000-08:00

We're working on a new version of 'Making Movies Make Sense' in partnership with Cineclub. This guide to film language, out in the Spring, will have all-new HD video clips, more editable footage and activities, and will be aimed at Key Stages 2 and 3 (around 8-14). I used a sequence from the resource on a soundtrack creation workshop at the Soundtrack Festival the other week. Here's the soundtrack which one group created using Garageband.

Why film is important

2011-09-27T02:20:00.001-07:00

Article by Don Boyd of the London Film School in yesterday's Guardian: We're all filmmakers now

The Story of Film: An Odyssey

2011-09-21T07:56:00.001-07:00

Mark Cousins' series is now up to episode 3 of 15 on More4. You've only got 12 days left to catch Episode 1 on demand. Cousins' dry delivery takes a bit of getting used to, but the series is required watching for anyone who's interested in film.

What I've found fascinating is how radical much early cinema still looks: the horse-mounted shots from Abel Gance's Napoleon wouldn't look out of place in a modern film, and the stark framing and brutal closeups of Dreyer's Joan of Arc look much more recent than the 1920s. Yes, you could find out about all these films from books (including Cousins' own book on which the series is based) but seeing them makes so much difference.

The series has much more of an emphasis on world cinema (non-Hollywood and non-Western) than many film histories.

MediaEd

2011-09-01T11:22:00.001-07:00

We've just relaunched MediaEd, the UK media and moving image education site. It includes an interactive version of Using Film in Schools (see below), listings, a directory of moving image education providers, equipment recommendations and suggestions for films to use in the classroom. It's still a bit rough round the edges (we don't get any funding for the site so we have to slot in time to work on it when we can) but I think it's brighter and easier to use than the old version.

Canon 60D

2011-09-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

I asked on the Media Education Association forum recently and it turns out some Media Studies teachers are using HDSLRs such as the Canon 7D with their students. Obviously there are drawbacks - handling, focus and sound - but the image quality, particularly in low light, is very good. As you can see from the picture of my Canon 60D rig below, they can also be fairly cumbersome once you add all the extra stuff you need.

I'm impressed with the 60D. It feels very solid, the in-camera audio is surprisingly acceptable, and it's allowed me to resurrect my great old Olympus OM Zuiko manual focus lenses. (The focus puller is a bolt strapped onto the lens with two reusable zip ties.)

The results are terrific, but focusing with the Live View is very tricky. I ended up buying an LCDVF viewfinder magnifier. It's well made (it should be at nearly £100) and gives a good clear image, but it doesn't have diopter (eyesight) adjustment like the much more expensive Zacuto alternative. I've made a removable mount from black foam board, with an elastic strap, to mount it on the 60D's articulating screen. Two layers of board move the viewfinder far enough from the screen to focus without eyestrain.

Here's some footage shot with it (and the cheap kit 18-55 kit lens) from the forthcoming Making Movies Make Sense 2 which we're developing with Cineclub.

I used a Gorillapod Focus and a Manfrotto tilt head which makes handholding much easier.

I also shot some audio dialogue footage: for that I used a Zoom H1 recorder mounted on a baby Gorillapod. I'll be using Final Cut X to sync it - I did my first editing with the same setup on FCX (a video of a music performance for a friend's daughter) couple of weeks ago and it did the job, though the learning curve is quite steep.

Separado

2011-05-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

Finally got round to watching this 'documentary' in Welsh, English and Spanish by Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals, about a year after anyone else. It's got something for everyone - it's loosely based on a road trip visiting the Welsh colony in Patagonia to trace some of Rhys' ancestors. Fascinating, informative, thought-provoking and eccentric.

I really liked the use of split-screen video mosaics to illustrate songs (could inspire some student work by Final Cut geeks?). Also the making-of film shows that a lot of the footage for the montages was shot on digital compact cameras (they look like Panasonic TZ7s). Four weeks of shooting, 80 hours of film, two and a half years editing, and it's only £6.49 on Amazon.

We're going to produce a teaching resource on it for the Film Agency for Wales later in the year.

Final Cut Pro X

2011-04-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

Apple have just announced a replacement for their well-regarded pro editing software Final Cut Pro. As you can see, the new version looks like iMovie 11 on steroids. I'm intrigued that they've based the interface for the pro app on the consumer app. But the new iMovie was often quicker to work with than FCP, even for quite sophisticated editing, so it makes sense. And the interface now offers a very clear progression route from consumer/learner to pro. There are lots of new features such as background rendering, the ability to start editing while still ingesting material, and easy ways of cataloguing material, and it integrates the features of Soundtrack and the user-unfriendly Color - these were previously separate applications within Final Cut Studio.

No word on what's happening to Motion, DVD Studio Pro and Compressor, the other elements of Final Cut Studio. Final Cut Express is apparently being squeezed out.

It'll be available on the App Store in June for $299, far less than the $999 you have to pay for Final Cut Studio.

If they can get education and volume pricing right this application could be a real killer, especially compared to Adobe's Premiere - I tried the Mac version of Premiere Elements recently and found it very clunky.

Ciné-minis

2011-04-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

The BFI recently released another in their excellent series of DVD short film compilations for teaching. Ciné-minis, produced in association with the Institut Français, is a collection of short French films, divided into categories for older and younger children. France has a thriving short film culture (see Arte TV's site Court Circuit if you read French) so these films are really well-made and inventive. You can watch them without subtitles, or with subtitles in English or French. The latter are really useful - I spent some time on a train watching the funny and charming 00h17 with the subtitles, looking up any words I didn't know on the excellent Ultralingua iOS dictionary, and then watched it againe without the subtitles.

Using film in schools: a practical guide

2010-12-06T10:27:00.000-08:00

I've written a guide to film in schools, which was commissioned by Film: 21st Century Literacy and is now available to download free from mediaedwales.org.uk/usingfilm. This 50-page PDF is designed to make film manageable and accessible in any school. It includes suggestions on how to use film and filmmaking across the curriculum from Key Stage 1 up to 16+ in a dozen subjects; guidance on how to setting up spaces and the equipment you need for viewing, discussing and making films; where to find support and resources; and how copyright and the law affects film education. We're working on a navigable web version, which will be going on the MediaEd site which we're relaunching in the next few weeks.

To plan or not to plan?

2010-11-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

Just done a Canon roadshow event in Nottingham Trent University, looking at how Mac software works with HDSLR footage for video and stills. I caught the presentation just before mine by photojournalist Rii Schroer who shoots stills and video for the Times and Daily Telegraph. It was really interesting, looking at the challenges of working in both media at once. She showed several of her own short film reports for the newspapers' online editions (featured on her Vimeo page), which make great use of HDSLRs' shallow focus/low light capability and have a really individual style and freshness.

Rii works to tight deadlines, and her films often only involve half a day's shoot and half a day's editing. She stressed how much research she does in advance, and how she storyboards in detail in advance. It's an interesting contrast with the subject of the book I'm reading at the moment: Emmanuel Carrère's 'Un Roman Russe'. Despite its title (A Russian Novel) it's a factual book, partly about the making of his critically acclaimed 2004 documentary Retour à Kotelnitch (Return to Kotelnitch - sorry, no subtitled version of the trailer available) about a town in Russia, which he claims to have made with no clear idea of story in advance. I haven't seen the film but I'm putting the DVD on my Christmas list...

iMovie 11, Aperture and HDSLRs

2010-11-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

The new iMovie is a real step forward and brings the welcome return of some iMovie HD features. (I've been surprised to find how many schools are still using the old version.) It has much better audio editing (similar to iMovie HD, allowing you to adjust levels within a clip) and the option to view clips in a timeline mode. It has a lot of other tweaks including the ability to choose whether adding transitions shortens your movie (as it's always done in previous versions) or preserves the timing as in Final Cut. There are also some dummy 'animatic' clips, which are animated examples of shots such as closeups and long shots - you can use these to plan your movie, then replace them with the actual clips. The program also has an elaborate 'trailer' mode - trailers with professional titles and music, with clips you can replace with your own footage. The only real drawback is that it only works with recent versions of Snow Leopard.

Aperture 3 is also an improvement on its predecessor, making it easier to manage multiple libraries and introducing support for HDSLR video footage, which is useful as I've just had a Canon 60D on loan. I'm impressed with the quality of the full HD video it produces. The viewfinder is nice and bright and the articulating screen is very useful. I filmed some dancers recently and was sliding the camera along the floor and using a monopod for ultra-high-angle shots - when I've edited it and tidied it up I'll put it online here. It's not as solid as my Nikon D300, and the handling for still photography is a bit slower, but it's around 200g lighter (and only 200g heavier than my old Olympus OM series film cameras which were famous for being small and light).

I'm planning to switch to Canon (rather than buying a Nikon HDSLR) largely because their body and lens mount design allows you to fit other manufacturers' lenses, using adaptors you can buy cheaply on eBay. This gives you access to really good-quality and very affordable fast manual focus lenses (autofocus is largely irrelevant for film). These include 70s and 80s Nikon lenses, and the Olympus OM Zuiko lenses which are tiny and great - my 50mm f/1.8, which you can pick up for around £35, has beautiful out-of-focus bokeh effects, and on the 60D it's the equivalent of an 80mm portrait lens but focuses a lot closer than my 85mm Zuiko. A 24mm Zuiko works well too, giving a moderate wideangle effect of 38mm.

Camera and microphone

2010-09-27T12:22:00.000-07:00

Techy stuff again, I'm afraid: a couple of interesting new developments. Number one is a new HDSLR. the Canon 60D, same sensor and HD video quality as the 7D but cheaper, better audio, and a pivot screen (Canon's first for an SLR). Looks very good, hoping to get one soon.

Second is the Zoom H1, a small sub-£100 digital recorder. Plug a £30 tieclip microphone into it and you've got a much cheaper alternative to radio mics (sync up the soundtrack in the editing process). Also, because it doesn't have to be attached to your camera you can get seriously creative with sound design. Anybody see 'Sleep Furiously'? The sound design on that was really interesting, with individual sounds being isolated and highlighted in a non-naturalistic way that would be impossible with a microphone connected to a camera.

Film-making revolution?

2010-05-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

Here’s some amazing time-lapse footage of the Icelandic volcano. (Go to Vimeo to get the full HD effect). The reason I’m showing it is that it was shot with a still camera, not a video camera. This particular film was recorded as a series of still images and then assembled together as a video, but the camera used would have shot full HD video. Something fairly revolutionary is happening in low-budget film-making: indie film-makers can get better results with a still camera costing around £700 than with a video camera costing £5000.

The footage above was shot with the semi-professional Canon 5d, which costs around £1700 for the body. The same camera was used to film the most recent series finale of House (see trailer below), which gives you an idea of its capabilities. But you can now get close to that quality with their consumer camera, the 550d, which costs around £600 (body only).

Why is it better than a video camera? The main reason is that SLR cameras have huge sensors compared to normal video cameras - even £5000 ones. The Canon 5d has a sensor as big as a traditional 35mm still frame, while the cheaper 7d and 550d have sensors roughly the same size as a 35mm movie frame. (They’re different because in a still camera the film runs sideways, while in a 35mm movie camera it runs vertically and includes an audio track). This means that images shot in low light look much better, because a larger sensor suffers much less from ‘noise’ (an unpleasant multicoloured grain effect) in those conditions. It also reduces depth of field, so you can get nice shallow-focus effects.

The second reason is that an SLR takes interchangeable lenses. So you can buy (or hire) an ultrawide lens if you want to play at being Sergei Uresevsky. If you want shallow depth of field, you can get a ‘prime’ (non-zoom) lens with a wide aperture, which will have much better image quality and better-looking out-of-focus backgrounds (what photographers call ‘bokeh’) than you can get with a zoom video lens.

Many indie film-makers and documentary makers are going down this route. There are drawbacks to using a DSLR for film-making: the body shape is designed for shooting still images with the camera to your eye, so the handling is poor unless you mount it on a tripod or special rig; and sound recording is limited (so most film-makers will record sound separately with a digital audio recorder and sync later). But it does mean that, suddenly, you can get extraordinary image quality at a price most people can afford (I haven’t bought one yet, but I’m planning to).

Will they be used much in education? They are demanding in terms of planning and technical skills, so I can’t see them replacing video cameras for most school use. But I can see them being used in Art, Moving Image Arts, and standalone film-making projects where image quality is important.

Just one word of caution: I think the HDSLR is an intermediate stage in the evolution of the video camera. I suspect that someone (probably Canon) will soon bring out an affordable camera specifically designed for video, but with the same large sensor and ability to take SLR lenses.

The case for global film

2010-05-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

I've just come across The Case for Global Film, a blog about using non-Hollywood film in education, run by Roy Stafford (of 'in the picture' magazine fame) with contributions from Roy, Keith Withall, Nick Lacey and Rona Murray. Loads of material with some really useful and interesting reviews, teaching ideas and links.

Abderrahmane Sissako

2010-03-12T11:26:00.000-08:00

I presented a session on FIlm and Global Citizenship, focusing on African film, at the Pierhead Sessions in Cardiff last week. One filmmaker I discovered while preparing for the session was the wonderful Aberrahmane Sissako. I used two of his films, Bamako and Waiting for Happiness. Bamako, the most overtly political of the two, works very well but Waiting for Happiness was a revelation. You can get the impression watching Sissako's films that nothing is happening, but there's a lot going on: seemingly irrelevant details will make sense later in the film, and there's subtle humour, metaphor and symbolism. I don't want to spoil the film by giving away examples. The cinematography, by Jacques Besse (who also shot Bamako) is terrific: powerful graphic compositions, full of colour and texture, and precise deep-focus shots. Sissako gets wonderful performances out of non-professional adult and child actors, and it's a deeply humane film. Highly recommended.

Film by numbers

2010-02-22T11:12:00.000-08:00

Interesting article in the current New Scientist suggesting that successful Hollywood blockbusters follow a pattern of editing duration which matches human attention spans. The same issue also mentions a system of automatic filming for shooting sports action without camera operators or directors. Sooner or later somebody is going to work out how to create a Hollywood blockbuster without human intervention.

An article in November suggested that still photographers will no longer have to anticipate Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment": instead, software will allow them to combine information from video and high-definition stills to create high quality images from video footage. Personally, I quite like what you can do by just rezzing up ordinary video framegrabs in Photoshop, like this one:

Final science fact, this time not from NS but from a neuroscientist friend: humans learn and remember stuff from moving images better than they do from still images.

Unspoken Cinema

2010-01-14T09:39:00.001-08:00

Unspoken Cinema: journal of contemplative cinema is a really useful site if, like me, you're interested in montage, non-narrative and experimental cinema. The chronological list of films - going back to 1895! - is particularly useful.

Ffilmschool 2 report

2009-10-14T05:18:00.000-07:00

A report on our Ffilmschool 2 project is now online. The report was commissioned by the Film Agency for Wales and undertaken by Dr Aparna Sharma of the University of Glamorgan. It makes some useful points about the value of using non-narrative film with Year 6 and 7 children, and the way in which this film, music and poetry project developed basic skills with these children.

Video notebook

2009-06-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I did think about buying a Flip Mino HD, but for another £100 I got a Panasonic TZ7 instead. It's a remarkable piece of kit: a point-and-shoot compact camera that shoots HD video, with stereo sound, for less than £300. Having a video camera I can take anywhere is opening up a huge number of creative possibilities. It's silent and unobtrusive for recording children working in a classroom, and for my personal work the 300mm, optically stabilised telephoto is great for abstract compositions. There are a few niggles: the mode dial is too easy to accidentally reset, the dynamic range for stills is pretty limited (so white shirts bleach out unless you dial down the exposure). But a pocket HD video camera (even if it is only 30fps and 720p - half the frame rate and two thirds of the resolution of 'full' HD) is a remarkable creative tool.

They have a lot of potential for use in schools: the zoom range means that students can experiment with real wide angle and telephoto shots, while most basic camcorders don't go either wide or long enough.

Here's some of the first video footage I shot with it. Not impressed with the quality of Flickr's HD video - I'll put it on Vimeo soon.

Taking framegrabs from video can make for funky but low-fi stills:

Awen

2009-05-29T04:10:00.000-07:00

For anyone who's interested in film, poetry and montage, June 12th and 13th at the Atrium in Cardiff is the date for 'Awen: the international festival of poetry and film'. ('Awen' is the Welsh word for 'inspiration'). The festival itself looks fascinating, and it's also linked to a programme of screenings at Chapter, including 'Man with a Movie Camera' at 6.15 on Tuesday 9th June.

I am Cuba

2009-04-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

Soy Cuba (I am Cuba), is a Soviet/Cuban propaganda film from 1964. The script is leaden propaganda but the cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, turned it into a dazzling visual poem. His extraordinary 'subjective camera' technique uses continuous camera movement with an ultrawide lens, instead of montage, to take the image from wide shot to closeup to wide. One scene contains probably the most amazing tracking/crane shot ever: the camera starts among the mourners at a revolutionary's funeral procession, ascends vertically several floors to enter the window of a cigar factory, tracks across a room, and then leaves through another window and 'flies' slowly along the street at roof level several stories up. The sound design is also frequently remarkable.

Inevitably, the film was condemned for 'formalism' (the number one crime for a Soviet artist - Shostavokitch was also accused of it). It was rescued from obscurity in the 1990s by enthusiasts including Martin Scorsese.

Mac stuff

2009-04-06T13:08:00.000-07:00

Just got to grips with iMovie 09 as I've been training teachers with it at the Apple Teacher Institute in Cheltenham. It really is a huge improvement on last year's version, and I'm looking forward to working out how to use it in the classroom. Green screen, the new video effects, and titles look remarkably professional, and the video stabilisation feature makes good handheld footage look like it was shot with Steadicam. With cutaways and the ability to edit to the beat, it's good enough to use for A-level Media Studies coursework and is the obvious solution.

It's an economical solution if you buy the cheapest Mac laptop (the MacBook White) which now has the same processor and graphics card as the shiny new aluminium ones. This means it should be pretty future-proof - I had avoided buying them because of the lack of a powerful graphics card, as this will be increasingly important in future Mac OS versions and programs. It's also past-proof as it has a Firewire card for connecting a miniDV camera, unlike its more expensive sibling.

Final Cut Express is 'sick'

2009-02-18T14:02:00.001-08:00

or so say the young people I'm working with in Fairwater, Cardiff over half term. They've created music in Garageband and they're now making montages to edit to the rhythm, and they are fascinated by the possibilities of compositing. (Sick, by the way, is a term of approval - see www.urbandictionary.com). I'll be posting some of their work on our project blog within the next few days.

Art of the Title

2009-01-15T07:17:00.000-08:00

Just found this extremely useful site. It's all about movie title sequences. You can view them (some in hi-def), and if you click on the 'Direct Link' you can download the sequence in good quality QuickTime format. There are some classic examples there - look at the Soylent Green montage to see just what you can do with music, still images and Ken Burns-style effects. At the other end of the technological scale is the stunning 3D animation sequence for the Russian film Novaya Zemla.

Flip

2009-01-12T01:28:00.001-08:00

Julian Coultas has sent me some test footage which suggests that I may have been too dismissive of the Flip video camera - he tells me that the image quality is suprisingly good.

If you look about 26 seconds in you'll see some unusual distortion where movement has caused vertical objects to appear to lean forward. I think this is because of the camera's slow scan rate - it's similar to the distortion which a focal-plane shutter caused in this 1913 picture by Jacques-Henri Lartigue. Which makes me wonder whether we might start seeing a Flip video aesthetic where people deliberately use the camera's distortion for effect - a bit like the Holga still film camera which has a cult following because of the image defects caused by its simple lens and basic build quality.

iMovie 09

2009-01-07T01:12:00.001-08:00

The new iMovie was launched last night, and according to the 'What's New' video on the Apple site it looks as if it was well worth the wait. It has a whole load of new features. One vital feature, for me, is the 'Precision Editor' which acts like the trim window in a pro editing program. You can adjust incoming and outgoing clips, and you can also do split edits (moving the audio edit point separately from the video edit) with remarkable ease. In addition, while it still doesn't have a real timeline, you can add markers to audio clips so you can edit to the beat of music (or, presumably, to a voiceover).

Another remarkable feature is video stabilisation: it can analyse video clips to remove camera shake. A couple of years ago it would have cost you a fortune to get the software to do this. So I think it's time to pension off iMovie HD. (Unfortunately that also means pensioning off our sturdy old G4 iBooks.)

And did I mention that it does green screen?

Lo-fi video

2009-01-06T06:16:00.000-08:00

I was recently sent a link to this comparison where the same film was made with a high-end Canon camera and a Flip video camera. He manages to demonstrate pretty conclusively that it's knowing how to make a film, not the equipment you use, that counts.

Using lo-fi equipment means you have to work within certain restrictions: the difference would have been much more obvious if the film had included camera movement or rapid subject movement, as the high compression of the lo-fi camera would have made the image break up.

But these restrictions (apart from avoiding movement, you need closeups and strong compositions, and ideally you record the sound separately) are exactly the kind of constraints that encourage creativity.

I used to be a judge on the Becta Creativity in Digital Media Awards. One of the neatest films we saw in the last round of awards was shot on a mobile phone. The students had worked out how to use the limitations of the phone to their advantage (they made an advert for the phone as a black-and-white silent movie with intertitles).

But I have to say that I'm a bit sceptical about the Flip compared with a digital still camera: it uses a nonstandard video format which makes editing a bit fiddly, and a digital still camera would be cheaper.

Black music and montage

2008-12-18T01:43:00.001-08:00

Just found an interesting piece about the theory of Black music on the excellent blog 'History is made at night'. The extract - from the writer Matthew P Brown - uses terms from film theory (montage, cut) to describe how some forms of Black and African music work. It's very relevant to an upcoming project of ours which will link music-making (specifically, funk) to montage editing.

Montage and poetry

2008-12-17T02:01:00.001-08:00

A lot of the work we do with film and poetry was inspired by a weekend workshop we did with a group of English and Welsh language poets a couple of years ago at Tynewydd, the National Writers' Centre for Wales. We worked alongside Ynyr Williams, producer of Dal:Yma/Nawr, and Mark Reid of BFI Education. Mark made a fascinating presentation about the links which the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein had made between poetry and film montage. Cinema, poetry, pedagogy: Montage as metaphor (PDF) is Mark's article on the topic from the New Zealand magazine English Teaching: Practice and Critique. There's a great excerpt from Eisenstein describing how he learnt montage from reading Milton.

Hard to reach

2008-12-03T05:36:00.000-08:00

I've just come across this useful report on the Becta site:
Digital Creativity and hard to reach learners.
I think this report needs publicising more widely.

Reframing literacy

2008-11-19T11:14:00.000-08:00

I was really pleased by the response to my presentation on the Ffilmschool projects at the Reframing Literacy conference last week. One delegate described the children's work as 'inspiring'.

As part of my presentation I showed an extract from Dziga Vertov's Soviet montage film Man with a Movie Camera, which I'd used in the Briton Ferry schools. The early morning sequence near the beginning makes a lot of use of unusual angles, symmetry and pattern, as well as numbers (eg a house with three windows, three benches in a park). One of the delegates asked where she could buy it, as she wanted to use it for teaching maths with younger children. A great idea.

Ffilmschool 2

2008-11-06T05:36:00.000-08:00

Here is a nice quote from one of the Year 6 boys who took part in our Ffilmschool 2 project:

"At first I found these ideas of what images make us feel, how music, angles and distance in shooting can affect our moods — all this felt very weird. Like when we were developing music to already edited montage sequences, there were images of mangled wires, bars, ripples etc. I felt they were not images of proper things, which you usually look at or images of proper people you usually look at. But as we developed the music and worked with images to create and communicate feelings — then it became more interesting for me. I started to like these ideas of images communicating feelings and how we could create moods with music. Moods of relaxation, happiness, feeling stuck… These ideas without words — just through music and the image… I have found this very new…"

iMovie to Final Cut

2008-11-04T07:30:00.000-08:00

iMovie - by which I mean iMovie 6, the final version of the program which first made digital video editing easy when it appeared in 1997 – is getting long in the tooth now. And the new iMovie lacks a timeline, at least at present. This makes it difficult to edit to a soundtrack, which is an essential part of some of our projects. (Rough cuts with the new iMovie, on the other hand, are blindingly fast and intuitive).

So I'm in the process of planning a couple of projects which will use Final Cut Express, Apple's semi-professional editing program, instead. I'm interested to explore how it can be used with children from 10 years old upwards, and in particular how they might exploit motion effects and compositing (without making an almighty mess!). It is more complicated than either version of iMovie, but the advantages are that I think it works in a more logical way, the creative possibilties are pretty much endless, and children are learning a program that follows a standard professional editing interface. I've used it with 14-year olds who loved it.

Projects

2008-11-04T07:12:00.000-08:00

I've just set up a blog to show examples of work from some of our most recent projects, at www.mediaedwales.blogspot.com

All the examples deliberately avoid trying to imitate mainstream film or TV drama, because trying to replicate them well is technically difficult and stifles creativity. Instead, I've focused on projects that look for ways of foregrounding creativity while following a structured film-making process: so they include poetry-writing, performance and music-making.

I found, particularly from Ffilmschool 2, that getting away from narrative and dealing with abstract shapes and patterns, and unfamiliar music, really sparked the children's imagination and helped them to look at things in a different way; though in the case of the film below - from Llansawel Junior School - this particular group imposed their own narrative.

I'm going to be doing a workshop at Soundtrack which will use the approach we adopted for the Llen y Lli workshops - show a fairly abstract montage film, use this as a basis for writing, then use the writing as the basis for a new film - but this time with the aim of stimulating music-making rather than poetry.

I was also quite inspired listening to some of the experimental music that came free on the cover of the October issue of the Wire magazine, and I'm thinking of using these soundscapes as a starting point for generating images or words as the basis of films.