In looking towards next year, I am offering two classes at our co-op, in the hopes of accomadating more families schedules.  One goal is to have a minimum of three students per class, as that will make the class more profitable for the students overall.  I will be teaching much of the same material, but am adding a couple of different movies, and changing when we begin the story writing process.  That will start much earlier than before.

My deepest thanks and appreciation to each and every student and parent who gave their time and effort this last year.  You truly blessed me, and my family, by your support.  Thanks again!

The students did well this year, and I found the only major bumps in the road to be two issues: we should have started the storymaking process earlier in the year, and there were technical issues that I did not know about. The storymaking process will be easy enough to resolve-we will simply start earlier on that. I am thinking of having a portion of each class time, starting in October, given over to some aspect or another of the film making project.

As far as the technical issues, I believe this can be resolved in a couple of ways-the first way is to communicate more with the students. I need to know more about their computers at home, to be able to help walk them through their files and editing. Also, I am considering making a flash drive a requirement for the students. It is an inexpensive way (less than $12) to take care of a large part of the technical issues we had this year, what with uploads from online and all.

I can see things in the class I want to move around a bit, but overall, I believe the content will be the same next year.

I am thankful for the students I had this year, and will post more of our movie once I have all the final products in from them. It has been a good year, and I am looking forward to next year.

Thank you to all the parents and students who participated this year.  To the students-you did great, and I really enjoyed teaching each one of you. :)  To the parents-thank you for your time and investement in your children.  They were each wonderful to have in class.  Have a great summer!

We went to the church offices to film again, and to hopefully finish up the scenes there. We generally do three takes of each scene, as I believe I mentioned before, and we finished all but one take of our scenes at the church. The students did very well, and now we are working on getting the video clips uploaded on their computers at home, so they can begin editing.

We had also planned to do two scenes that are outdoors, but the weather was not favorable towards that plan, so we will hopefully finish filming this next week.

The first Tuesday we filmed went great-we are limited to our time to film to less than an hour per week, so we are having to run through shots at a pretty good clip. We are following our friend’s advice (who is a filmmaker in NYC), and taking three shots of each scene-the master shot, then up a bit closer, with a final shot of the characters or scenes up close. This is time consuming, but certainly leaves us with more material to choose from to edit. So, the first week was fine.

However, this last week, everything seemed to go wrong (Spielberg should have such a day!)-costumes, props, and even the DVD’s to film on were all forgotten. Then, we had the challenge of students who did not have the lines down. Obviously, this was a challenge. We were able to film only one of the five or so scenes we had to get done.

It was discouraging, I think, to most of us involved, but at the same time there is something to be said for understanding that the Lord saw all of this coming. To teach the students a Biblical view of film and culture, I know we must start with teaching them how to trust the Lord, and believe He is good in all circumstances. So, onto next week, with a lesson learned that somehow this must work out for our good. :)

Working through the details of a shot

We are filming a story which primarily takes place in offices, and have been fortunate to be able to use a building where it looks like the offices are located in different buildings.

Filming

Waiting, while shooting other actors

I have really appreciated the input from the students, although I would probably appreciate more. They are a good group, and I have only had a bit of a challenge getting them motivated. Once they get rolling, they are doing well with thoughts on camera angles, script continuity, and also I was impressed with one of the props especially. I had said, “I want it to look this way…” not knowing how it would come out (being that I didn’t know how well I had communicated it on my side), and the student came back with a fantastic prop! Very nice.

It has also been very encouraging to have the writers strive very hard to stick to a consistently Biblical storyline. There are some great touches added by the student writers, where there is an obvious connection to the parable’s point of how Jesus was speaking to the Pharisees. I was impressed with not only the desire of the students to reflect the truth of the parable, but with the creativity shown there.