Teaching filmmaking for Cultural Arts Day at Monroeton Elementary School

Today has been one of the best, most fun-filled days that I've had in quite a long time. And most of that is because of how I got to talk about being a filmmaker and show some "tricks of the trade" for the students of Monroeton Elementary School in Reidsville, as part of the Cultural Arts Day that it held today.

Cultural Arts Day had folks coming in to demonstrate arts like painting, sculpting, mosaics, music and storytelling. And in Mrs. Marsha Lipford's room, we set up a "mini movie studio" - complete with camera, greenscreen and even some props and costumes - for the kids to check out...

There were five groups of students who came in during the day. Here I am telling some fourth-graders about how I got into filmmaking and how they can get into this too. I especially told them that if they want to make movies, they should read as much as they can and also come to enjoy writing...

For each group, we did a "walkthrough" of how a movie goes from idea to written script, and then finding actors and a set to shoot the action on, and then editing it all together and distributing it.

For the event I also put together a "demo reel" showcasing some of KWerky Productions' projects during the past few years, including several scenes from Forcery...

One of the clips from Forcery that the kids got a kick out of was my "death scene" where Frannie shoots Sheriff Boozer from behind with the shotgun. I'm glad now that in the end I used the less-graphic second version of that effect 'cuz three years later, the first one still does bother me to think about... but the kids all thought that my "death" was pretty funny! The students loved the lightsaber effects, and they also got to watch clips from The Baritones (they enjoyed seeing Monroeton Elementary itself make a cameo appearance), some of Schrodinger's Bedroom and of course I couldn't resist showing them my first school board campaign commercial. A lot of the kids cheered when they saw the Death Star blowing up the schoolhouse :-)

But the real highlight of each session came toward the end, when we got to use the greenscreen, the high-def camcorder and my video rendering system along with the Ultra CS3 chromakey software to let the students experience video special effects firsthand. Mrs. Ledford picked some students who then got in front of the greenscreen, and then I would put them in some crazy locations. Here's one guy that we sent to the beach (by the way, for legal reasons I have to "black out" the students' faces)...

And here's one dude that we dressed up in my brown Jedi cloak and handed him my Master Replicas-made lightsaber prop, who was then digitally transported to the Jedi Temple from the Star Wars movies...

I also grabbed a weather satellite image of the United States from early yesterday morning and put that in the background, to give the students a chance to play "television weatherman" :-)

The kids were all really terrific and they were asking some very good questions in addition to totally "getting into it" :-)

I want to thank everyone at Monroeton Elementary School, especially Mrs. Lipford for letting me set up in her room, for allowing me to take part in today's activities. I can't say enough how wonderful it was to be a part of this.

Categories: art, cultural arts day, education, filmmaking, monroeton elementary school