Speech class wants to create a documentary. English 1 Support, I still think, will grow through projects such as video. More on both of those projects later because I hope to create some material that anyone can use to get such a thing going in their neck of the woods.
I showed this AFI video to Support for our note-taking session yesterday and will show it to Speech after Spring Break when they start to storyboard. It moves through the ten final shots pretty quickly, a good challenge for my Support kids who are just learning to take notes, but also makes it easy to understand what the shots are.
The American Film Institute (AFI) put together a series of videos that walk you through movie production. They have lesson plans, handouts, and audio/video resources that actually aren’t too shabby, at the very least providing a good skeleton for you to expand on. I heard about this curriculum a few years ago and am happy to have found it all. And it’s free, something I worried would be true back when it first caught my attention.
Links And Handouts
There are a few ways to get to all this stuff:
- AFI:
- AFI ScreenNation – The Lights, Camera, Education channel is where I spend most of my time, though some user submitted videos are in my list of favorites, soon to shine in my classroom. These will be some examples of documentaries for Speech to use as models.
- AFI Screen Education – This is all the same content, from what I gather. I just found this tonight when looking closer at a few URLs.
- Mike Phillips
- The Mike Phillips Blog – Found in the Digital Film category, Mike has slightly revamped the AFI stuff and I like his approach a bit more.
- The Jewel: Storyboard Glossary Of Common Film Shots – This is what grabbed me when I first heard of the curriculum. Sure, it’s also on pages fifty to sixty-one of AFI’s Educator’s Handbook, but I like it when I don’t have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I don’t need right now.
So there’s at least two sites…