Teaching movie making to elementary students was easier than expected | What the heckle?
In an era of children making short videos aspiring to be the next YouTube viral sensation, I shouldn’t have been surprised when my homeschool students took to learning movie production.
With my wife and I moving our boy/girl twins, Foster and Rylan, 10, into homeschool, we divided their subjects and learnings between us to suit our strengths. While their mother is stronger with teaching mathematics and science, I’m clearly better suited for teaching language arts and writing.
As for their extra curricular subjects, or what the elementary schools call “specials,” my wife handles teaching them home economics, including cooking, managing money, etc. With my background in theatre and video production, and our kids’ enthusiasm for creating YouTube videos, I decided to give the twins a drama/communications project for the fall.
The project? To create a motion picture from start to finish, from selecting a script to marketing and releasing the final movie. This included script study, rehearsal, character development, costume design, location scouting, acquiring the rights to the script, editing, creating the music and everything else involved at the core of a real independent movie production.
The project took about two hours a week over six weeks. And the deadline for the project was to release the movie to friends and family prior to the new year. At first, I didn’t think a total of 12 hours were going to be enough to produce an actual short movie, but we made it our goal to find a script which involved two characters, which could be performed by one boy and one girl, which was less than five pages long. This basically would translate to about five minutes of completed screen time.
Turns out, I underestimated how quickly the twins would take to the course of lessons and the project itself. For a bit of background, Foster and Rylan have appeared on camera for my own YouTube channel dedicated to writing tips; Rylan more so than the other. Given that experience, one could already tell Rylan has more natural acting ability than Foster, but Foster is coachable, or directable as those in production say, and is interested in the process of shooting and editing video. He is more interested in the production side of shooting a project than acting in one.
Regardless, the project required them to take roles as both an actor as well as a producer.
So we did some extensive searches on a website I belong to called the New Play Exchange. Using filters in our search to find the parameters of a script which would work for the project, we stumbled across a Writers Guild of America playwright named David Hansen whose catalog of super-short, small-cast stageplays was immense. We searched through the synopsis’ of many of his plays and finally found one titled Book, which fit our project perfectly.
Book was about a book lover who finds a book she is interested in and begins reading it until she is interrupted by the owner of the book. It was less than three pages long and was amusing in its message, and even better, it was young-person appropriate.
We read through the script and having agreed to it as our source material, we moved into building character backstories and costume design. The two filled our questionnaires regarding their characters’ histories and how they would dress. Once they decided what their characters would wear, we took a “field trip” to Goodwill to see what custom pieces we could find. In hindsight, that’s the point they both really committed to the project and started really having fun.
The next couple weeks, the twins rehearsed the script and we began “blocking,” or deciding character positions and movements, and they each drew a page of storyboards of camera shots they were hoping to include in the final movie. At that point, I reached out to writer David Hansen for his permission to perform his script for our student project. Hansen was very gracious of our request and gave us permission as long as the project wasn’t for making money and he was fully credited as the writer. He also allowed a couple script changes we needed to make to accommodate the twins’ age.
About the same time, we solicited Covered Treasures Bookstore in downtown Monument as our location to shoot the movie and gave the store a visit to determine where we would shoot scenes, natural lighting and power outlets available for shooting equipment. Tommi Plank, owner of the bookstore and former educator herself, was gracious enough to allow us to shoot the movie in her store and over the coming weeks we decided on a production date which worked for us.
A couple more rehearsals and the twins were chomping at the bit to start filming. Production day came and we shot the movie in the bookstore in less than three hours. I brought some extra hands to help out behind the camera including Mark Tachna, owner of Colorado Springs Video, and my oldest daughter Hartley. The twins did fantastic with the usual flubs and laughter, but they eventually sunk into their roles and we completed the shoot on schedule.
For post-production lessons, I showed them how to edit the video using iMovie, which comes preloaded on almost every Apple device. Their post-production assignments included arranging the musical score, which Rylan volunteered to do, and doing actor promotional interviews on camera, which Foster made it his goal to arrange. Creating a website, with my direction, from which people could view the movie, see video shorts on the making of the project, information on the playwright and a page where people could leave a review was also involved.
Soliciting feedback for the project was a part of their marketing assignment, but the twins were apprehensive to do so at first. They were worried about people not liking the movie and stating such.
“Part of educational theatre or educational movie making is learning to accept a bad review,” I told them. “You have to put your creation out to the world to interpret, otherwise it isn’t considered art.”
The movie and project was finished just after Christmas, and the twins’ website for the movie was released to friends and family before new years as planned. I was so impressed with what the kids gave to the project from start to finish. One of the greatest satisfactions for them was sending the weblink to view the movie to the playwright for this feedback.
“Such a fun movie. I am so pleased,” Hansen responded. “Please give your students my best, and congratulations on a job well done.”
In hindsight, I thought instructing this project for the twins was going to be much more difficult than it actually ended up being. But again, these kids are coming from a generation where they are already creating short videos for YouTube to share with friends. I don’t know why I thought the project was going to be more than they could handle. In the end they learned a ton about video production and had lots of fun putting it together.
Foster seemed to enjoy shooting a movie more than Rylan though. He enjoyed it and found it easier to shoot the story out of order on location. Rylan is more suited for theatre where actors present the story in a linear telling. She found the process of shooting it as a movie “confusing,” but she doesn’t give herself enough credit based on initial feedback.
If anyone is interested in seeing the student-made production of Book, visit the project website at www.BennFarrellWriter.WixSite.com/BookProject.
From left, Benn Farrell, Foster MacDougall-Farrell and Rylan MacDougall-Farrell shoot a scene for the student-made production of Book by writer David Hansen, shot on location at Covered Treasures Bookstore in Monument.
As an assignment for the student-made movie Book, homeschool student Rylan MacDougall-Farrell designed storyboards for the movie to help determine camera shots she wanted in the finished project.
From left, in a shot from the student-made movie Book, students Rylan MacDougall-Farrell and Foster MacDougall-Farrell produced and acted in the homeschool project learning motion picture production. The movie was shot on location at Covered Treasures Bookstore in Monument prior to Christmas.
Benn Farrell