So, for whatever reasons this spring semester I commited my student workers and myself to putting on a series of free filmmaking workshops for teens that took place at the Hunter Museum. Was a pretty big success in my book, since we got kids from very diverse backgrounds and schools including UTC, GPS, Baylor, McCallie, Red Bank, and Howard (thank you Ms. Lyon!)
The purpose for me was to try to do everything possible to promote local film submission for the Back Row Film Series. The other reason I guess was to make use of the amazing resources of two of my current student workers who are into filmmaking in a big way, as well as to get other local filmmakers to come out and share their expertise. All of this took place with degrees of success ranging from better than I could have expected to OK, let's just get this over with. All-in-all I think everyone involved had a good time and enjoyed the events.
I basically coordinated the whole thing with assistance from the curators of education at the museum. The idea was to do three workshops, the first on pre-production (writing scripts), the second on production (shooting), and the third on (postproduction). I leaned heavily on my students, Ryan and Kashad, for the first one, since I haven't written the first screenplay. We did cover som other materials that day as well, but for the most part followed the curriculum described here. The next workshop I had more expertise in and planned the workshop accordingly. Tried to cram too much into 2.5 hours, but all in all it was effective. That day's plan can be seen here. Finally we closed with postproduction which was planned during most kids spring breaks and was poorly attended. That curriculum is still in note form but will appear as an article on the Chattanooga Film Blog shortly.
We used a bit of material from the Film Foundation who have two terrific curriculums for teach film appreciation and filmmaking to kids call The Story of Movies and Creativity on Film. These are very rich resources that I would like to incorporate more fully if I ever do this again.
This was a very interesting project because I have some good information and experience to share, but putting it into the form of a 3-day workshop series that would be useful and fun for students who signed up was difficult. Also, collaboratively building the curriculum with the other filmmakers was tough, since all most filmmakers want to do is sit around and trash popular directors and so forth, but we made it, and I think I learned a lot from the experience.
Check out my student's amazing work and a cameo by Mr. Willis at Lazy Bear Productions and Killing Elvis.
Posted by cmwillis at April 4, 2006 5:45 PM | TrackBack