I decided I'd do a brief writeup of our digital film club because it's been one of the most successful teen programs I've run in the library - perhaps the most successful one I've run continuously as a "class". Here's how it all started:
Back in the late 90s, sometime after our first renovation of the YA room, we realized the computers we'd gotten back then (a cd-rom catalog and a windows 3.1 machine) would need to be replaced. Since I was familiar with the Mac OS and had a Mac at home, I requested a couple of iMacs, which we got. Some months later, after Apple had come out with iMovie 2, a couple of young men (14 or so) came in holding a videocamera and asked me politely if they could edit their film on our computers. I had to expain that our computers didn't have firewire, which they would have needed to get their clips onto the computers, but those boys planted a seed in my mind. So, when we were thinking of replacing the computers again, I wrote a request for two new eMacs with firewire, DVD burners, and iLife software installed. I also asked for two digital video cameras to start a film club for kids between 11 and 16 years old. The Friends of the Library approved my request and gave me a $3,000 grant to purchase the equipment. We got the equipment two years ago in July, and the film club was born.
The first thing I had to do was to familarize myself with the software and hardware, and then come up with a brief curriculum and advertise the club. The iMovie software is actually very easy to use; it's structured like a word processor, allowing kids to highlight, cut, copy and paste their clips. It's also very easy to import clips from the cameras. So you don't have to be any kind of technical wizard to run a program like this one. In fact, one of the things the kids love about it is that they get to play around, writing music in garageband, moving their finished songs into iTunes, and then moving the songs from iTunes into iMovie. They showed me how to do that, and also how to do voiceovers! Where I come in is offering them a structure and a time and place to experiment. This was my basic curriculum for the first year:
Late September: Storyboards. The kids viewed "chaos in the kitchen from "Jurassic Park" and then examined the storyboard for this sequence. I asked them why a person might want to plan out a complex action shot. Then they split into four groups; two worked on writing scripts and/or drawing storyboards, while two more worked with the cameras. Then the groups switched. Timing: 20 minutes or so for soda and pizza, then ten minutes for the film clip. Then five minutes or so for discussion and breaking into groups, and each group got 25 minutes or so for preproduction and the same for work with the cameras. Total, an hour and a half or a bit over. We had 20 kids between 11 and 14 or 15 years old at the first meeting. This dropped off as the year went on, but we almost always had at least 10 to 12 kids for every large-group meeting. We met about once every four to six weeks through the school year, on Wednesday nights between 6:30 and 8:00.
Early December: Sound in movies. We viewed a clip with and without the sound, and the kids practiced using sound effects and moving songs into iMovie.
January: POV - Hitchcock, the 39 Steps. Where is the camera, and why? How do you tell a story visually?
Feb/March: Credits and subtitles: The Birds, opening credits. We also viewed a brief clip from the film and discussed what made it suspenseful.
We also discussed transitions and effects and the kids practiced cutting, copying and moving their clips.
It wasn't till the end of the second year that the kids got to have an official showing of their movies, which we did at the end of May. We hope to do the same this year. Some of the original kids (who were then 8th graders and are now sophomores) are still in the club and we add new 6th and 7th graders every year. It's been great! We did advertise the program in all our usual ways two years ago, but, since then, word of mouth has been our best method of advertising. The club is limited to 20 kids, because it's very hands-on and labor intensive, and I can't imagine coping with more than 20 youngsters by myself. We are hoping to add a third computer and camera this winter.
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