Filmmaking - post 1

Last week we painted on plastic (I just put a laminate sheet through without paper in between to get a clear plastic sheet) - and used sharpies to create an image of a robot, or something that moves... skateboarders were popular...

We took these on our excursion across town the next day... and produced some short films... which i intend to put together... last weekend felt a bit shorter than usual as I spent the Saturday doing a course on Socratic dialogue..

anyway... this is one of those films

After watching the films on a small screen last week the children thought we needed to worok on a background to do something similar... but film across our own background rather than on the train...

So I felt it could be fun to take building os Stockholm... to help the children get to learn more about the city that they live in.

So today we did a google search of building in Stockholm and the children looked through the small images and found a building they wanted to draw... I printed them out... and as the children got drawing them I found out the location of each of the buildings, some facts and also I could show the children how the building looked like on the inside... the internet is an amazing tool.

We intend to visit all the building they have selected from the screen... so they will be able to discover its location in Stockholm and also get a feel of "their" building.

Afterwards we messed about with the imotion app on the i-pad to create a stop-motion film.
If we are wanting to make a film, then I feel they need to get to know a few different techniques... and to also practice using them... so that they can decide which one they want to use in the final film-making.

It was a lot of fun... and the children need to collaborate, give each other space and have an awareness of where their figure was on the screen... lots to think about... there was not so much thinking about what the purpose of this film was, or what story it was telling... it was just about moving... but there was no director either... so I guess we will have to go into that too...

Afterwards the children felt that this film was about a race... on my app the film plays on a loop, which is much more satisfying for the children... and we can control the speed of the film, which fascinated them...

In the afternoon there was some more film-making, this time with the cubes...

Children from the other groups were interested and came over... and got into the film-making business too... several films were made with the blocks... 4-5 year olds taking control of the i-pad and getting creative. Here is one of those films to check out...

It will be interesting to see how the films develop as the children become more familiar with the technique.

This project is a part of the Leonardo Da Vinci project... the children became intrigued by his robot... and his desire to invent and make... we have seen films of robots... and the idea of film-making has come from that...