I've been plenty busy this past week with courses, editing for work, and so forth. On top of all of that, I was able to teach a production workshop for the Intro to Digital Filmmaking course for the Screen Studies department!
During my first semester of college, I took the Intro to Digital Filmmaking course. I loved everything about the class. It started off real simple by taking various still images the first week, recording sound the second week, and combining both elements to create a ciné-roman, which is pretty much sound going along to several still images to create a story in the third week. We worked up to create bigger projects such as a music video and a final 8-12 minute short film. Ever since I took the class, I developed a strong connection with the professor and allows me to come in once a semester to teach! Before this semester I have taught 2 separate workshops with my good pal, Skye Wingo. Today I had to present by myself as he is currently studying abroad in Japan. Skye is my film counterpart here at Clark and we work together on everything. Hope you're having a blast out there!
How the workshops usually go is that I will present various forms of the filmmaking process covering pre-production, production, and post-production and provide examples and tips from each section. Then I turn the class lose to create a short project in-class. To get the students into the mind frame, I had the class get into groups of 3, and have one of their members come up and pull an emotional tone out from a bag. My goal for the assignment was to have students plan, shoot, and edit a short 30-60 second video exemplifying their word. The groups over the two days selected anxious, melancholy, dreamy, old-fashioned, minimalist, and cynical.
30 minutes before class ended was when we all got back together to watch what everyone had created. I was amazed at how quickly everyone got onto their individual projects and got things done. Out of the past semesters I have taught, the students currently in this class outworked the past classes with speed. We gave the students a little less than 2 hours to complete the assignment and it seemed like not even into an hour of the project groups were already editing. It comes to show that these students are more aware, responsible, and crave creatively in a unique art craft. It was awesome to get to see what these students could come up with and present to the rest of the class given the plentiful amount of limitations before them. I can't wait to see what these students produce over the course of this semester, especially when their final films are due. These students aren't just filmmakers; they're critical thinkers.