Let's Make a Movie!!!

This week we got to do something extra fun and hilarious in ICT- we got to make movies! Now i'm not going to give it away as to what ours is, but it was a hoot to film and put together! On Monday we looked at videos and discussed what we can do with them, got into our groups and started talking about what we were going to do for short films. Tuesday we got our story board together and had everything planned out from roles, to props, and costumes. Wednesday we were busy all class filming but managed to get it all together and all of our scenes shot, there were MANY laughs to be had! Today (Thursday) we managed to throw all of our scenes together, overlay our music file, and do some editing to get a final product all in three days.
A little snapshot from our movie:

In order to get our project together we decided to film all of our scenes on an iPad and transfer the files over to a PC and use Windows Movie Maker. There would have been an easier way to go about this than we did. What we did was e-mail the individual files from the iPad to the PC, this was a time consuming and tedious process because we could only e-mail one file at a time and we had about twenty two. A faster process we noticed afterward would have been to plug the iPad in via USB and transfer the files that way. Lesson learned. When we had all the files transferred to the PC we put them into Windows Movie Maker and began editing our clips, moving them around, and getting our timing right. A problem that we ran into with the computers at the University was not being able to transfer our music audio file to overlay our video. This was a problem that was very time consuming and put a halt to our editing process, the security constrictions on the schools computers were what was making it difficult to get the audio file. We ended up saving what we had done and e-mailing the file, opening it up on a laptop and finishing the editing that way. This made it easier to add the audio because it was already purchased and on the laptop!

These are great skills for our students to have because it can really bring life to any projects that they may want to do a video for. Students could record themselves and make a video instead of doing a power point presentation, this may be easier for some students because they may be able to express their creative side and may be more comfortable presenting a movie rather than getting up and doing a power point presentation in front of the class. It is also more interactive and provides an opportunity to present more information that may not be able to be expressed in the form of a picture, or brought into the classroom. I will definitely be using this in my classroom with my students in multiple classes such as ELA- presenting a story line of a book that they have read, Science- using stop motion to make their own representations of properties of matter, or mitosis/meiosis. The possibilities are really endless in the movie making in the classroom!

This is a really fun exercise that I can't wait to use in the classroom with my students. Fun, educational, and engaging, what more can a teacher ask for?