Manaiakalani Film Festival 2016

Today was filled with excitement as about 100 films created across the cluster were brought together during a day of festivities. Students from the 12 schools of the Manaiakalani cluster came through the Sylvia Park Hoyts cinema to see themselves and their classmates on the big screen! The films were created with the NZ curriculum vision statement in mind: "...for young people to be confident, connected, actively involved, and lifelong learners" (MoE, 2007).

Photo: As part of the MDTA, we spent the day assisting with the ushering of the schools in and out of the theatres.

Eight showings were held in three theatres throughout the day, each with purposeful selection of films so students could see themselves and students from their own school on the screen. The movie which I created with my students was shown three times throughout the day. Check out the finished product of the movie, here. If you would like to see other films from the festival, click here.

The schools of the Manaiakalani cluster.

Movie Editing

The movie is finished! I am going to step you through the stages I took to get from a day's worth of filming and over 30 minutes of raw footage, to a 2 minute movie. 

In iMovie, I created an extremely rough cut of the raw footage in an approximate sequential order of the storyline. We had collected footage from three different types of cameras and from a number of different angles so this cut included quite a bit of repetition of the storyline. This rough cut was about 25 minutes long.

Next, I cut this rough cut down to 3 minutes. This took a long time as I needed to ensure the storyline was making sense.

I then 'tightened' my movie by ensuring each clip was no longer than it needed to be to tell the story. This made a huge difference to the quality of the movie and interest for an audience as it made the movie faster moving. 

I received feedback from my peers at Digital Immersion. I then went away to make changes as suggested.

I planned the voice overs and then found a microphone which would effectively capture the speech. I first tried capturing these voice overs using quicktime, but decided on using garageband so I could then assess the quality of the voice overs by looking at the sound waves created (bigger waves are better as you can alter them more).

Once my movie was approximately finished, I imported it into garageband where I could adjust the soundtrack and voice overs against the video. I found the process of correctly balancing the sound extremely challenging.

I then moved my video and audio back and forth between iMovie and Garageband multiple times until I was happy with the completed product. This involved matching the clips to the rhythm of the music. 

I received more feedback while watching the 'completed' movie on a big screen and through good-quality speakers. This allowed me to adjust the sound balance some more before doing a final export of the movie.

Watch this space (sometime next term) to see the final product!

The curious case of the missing goal posts

On Thursday, we filmed for film festival. The day was challenging as we aimed to gather the majority of our footage using a number of different cameras.

The order of capturing the footage turned out to be an important aspect to consider. In an ideal situation, it would make sense to capture the footage in the order of appearance in the movie, so nothing is missed. However, this was not practical when we started with ~40 students outside and other activities were planned on the field later in the day. I quickly learned the importance of getting the shots done quickly and moving on so students did not lose focus. We also had to be flexible with the order of filming so that it suited the time we had. We were faced with the challenge of completing as much filming as possible before lunchtime, when there was a rugby game being played (all our filming was done on the field). This meant our background started to change as ropes were put up, and various equipment started to appear around us. We had to think about how we were going to capture the footage we wanted in a realistic way without a changing environment. 

Can you spot the difference in these two shots? This was a great lesson in how quickly the environment can change while filming, and the importance of being adaptable! Never would I have thought that the rugby posts on the reserve would completely disappear from my shots! 

I finished the day by sorting through the footage and looking at how it turned out. The following day, I then created a rough cut of my movie to piece the footage together into the order it needed to be in.