What I have learnt this year creating our film for the Manaiakalani Film Festival!

Brainstorm early!

I learnt from last year the importance on brainstorming early, as it gives you time to change your idea if you realise it may not work so well. This year, I brainstormed in the holidays and over the first three weeks of term went back and forth between ideas before I settled on one that I knew would work with the whole class.

Think carefully about audio

If you are going to have students speaking in the film, make sure that you have a good plan as to how you will capture clear audio (think about wind noise outside, getting a good quality microphone and having a quiet shooting location). I decided this year to narrate our story and we recorded our audio on Garageband prior to filming.


If you write a script make sure you time it with the narrator

Once I had written my script I timed it at home to make sure I knew it would fit into 3 minutes. However, when I got to school and had my students record I realised that I must talk very fast! Luckily we had enough time to cut out certain parts to make sure it was the right length.


Have a filming day

Last year. I was given a day to film the whole movie and I found it worked well. It gave us a day to focus on the movie and then we could retake any scenes we needed. This year I told the students our filming day and we spent the entire day building props, getting our costumes ready and filming. We did have to change a few actors due to absentees, however I was able to reshoot a few scenes the following week to make sure all the students were involved.


Take lots of shots and angles of each scene

Our team leader made sure we understood the importance of taking a variety of shots and angles. This proved to be great advice when I later noticed that in some of my shots my hair had blown into the top of the lens!


Leave enough time for editing

Make sure you give yourself enough time for editing - not only will you save yourself a lot of stress, you will also have time to create a film which you feel is refined and something you can be proud of!


With our movie almost complete, we are now onto the editing and look forward to sharing it with you soon.... Keep posted to see an amazing effort by a beautiful class of Year 2's!