Moving Image – Developing students’ own film-making skills
Within university, we feel it is important to provide opportunities for students to make films themselves. This enables them to explore the possibilities of filming and editing. Moreover, it is almost always a very positive experience and students are pleased with what they manage to create. It is this opportunity to experiment with their own creativity that often convinces them of the value of using moving image texts in the classroom.
Whilst there can be pockets of expertise, many students will be filming and editing for the first time. Editing is a time-consuming process, particularly for beginners. We therefore provide short-filming tasks that allow plenty of scope for creativity. Some successful tasks have included:
- providing students with a short (c. 200 word long) passage from a novel to translate into film. Appropriate passages include Louis Sachar’s ‘Holes’ (pp. 11-13, from ‘The guard led Stanley…’ to ‘You’re not in the Girl Scouts anymore’, Mr Sir said.) and Robert Swindells’s ‘Room 13’ (pp. 148-15, from ‘They came. All of them.’ to ‘Fliss hissed, ‘Go’.). (Link to article)
- providing students with a single event to film, e.g. a greeting or a farewell, using toy figures/animals. They can then experiment with movement, sound, lighting, etc to create a distinctive context and mood for that interaction.
- Asking students to work in groups to create a film based on a neutral 4-line script, e.g. ‘D’you want a drink?, ‘Yes- can I have a coffee?’, ‘Of course – do you take milk and sugar?’, ‘Just milk, please’. Each group uses the same script but is allocated a different situation, e.g. one character is in love with the other, one character’s dog has just died, the conversation is between two spies. As the students can only use the neutral script, they are forced to use other resources to create meaning, e.g. music, lighting, gesture. (This is a particularly interesting exercise for looking at genre as it tends to generate very different kinds of film.)
- Asking students to work in groups to create short films that are all about the same place - in our case, we use the Sheffield Hallam University campus. We provide a variety of remits for these films: one group makes a film aimed at prospective students to be shown on an open day; another makes one for the students’ parents; one group makes a 5 minute film on student life to be screened just before Hollyoaks; another creates a 5 minute expose of an aspect of university life for inclusion in a local news broadcast. This activity is useful preparation for critical analysis of moving image texts (exploring underlying values and purposes and the influence the context of production, e.g. audience, producers, on the text itself).
In each case, different responses to the same task can be discussed and films can be evaluated in relation to technical and artistic elements. Having made and evaluated their films, students can be asked to reflect on the benefits of film-making in the classroom. This often leads onto discussion about where film-making is (or can be) placed in the curriculum.
 
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