Ffilmschool 2 report

A report on our Ffilmschool 2 project is now online. The report was commissioned by the Film Agency for Wales and undertaken by Dr Aparna Sharma of the University of Glamorgan. It makes some useful points about the value of using non-narrative film with Year 6 and 7 children, and the way in which this film, music and poetry project developed basic skills with these children.

Video notebook

Well, I did think about buying a Flip Mino HD, but for another £100 I got a Panasonic TZ7 instead. It's a remarkable piece of kit: a point-and-shoot compact camera that shoots HD video, with stereo sound, for less than £300. Having a video camera I can take anywhere is opening up a huge number of creative possibilities. It's silent and unobtrusive for recording children working in a classroom, and for my personal work the 300mm, optically stabilised telephoto is great for abstract compositions. There are a few niggles: the mode dial is too easy to accidentally reset, the dynamic range for stills is pretty limited (so white shirts bleach out unless you dial down the exposure). But a pocket HD video camera (even if it is only 30fps and 720p - half the frame rate and two thirds of the resolution of 'full' HD) is a remarkable creative tool.

They have a lot of potential for use in schools: the zoom range means that students can experiment with real wide angle and telephoto shots, while most basic camcorders don't go either wide or long enough.

Here's some of the first video footage I shot with it. Not impressed with the quality of Flickr's HD video - I'll put it on Vimeo soon.



Taking framegrabs from video can make for funky but low-fi stills:

Awen

For anyone who's interested in film, poetry and montage, June 12th and 13th at the Atrium in Cardiff is the date for 'Awen: the international festival of poetry and film'. ('Awen' is the Welsh word for 'inspiration'). The festival itself looks fascinating, and it's also linked to a programme of screenings at Chapter, including 'Man with a Movie Camera' at 6.15 on Tuesday 9th June.

I am Cuba

Soy Cuba (I am Cuba), is a Soviet/Cuban propaganda film from 1964. The script is leaden propaganda but the cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, turned it into a dazzling visual poem. His extraordinary 'subjective camera' technique uses continuous camera movement with an ultrawide lens, instead of montage, to take the image from wide shot to closeup to wide. One scene contains probably the most amazing tracking/crane shot ever: the camera starts among the mourners at a revolutionary's funeral procession, ascends vertically several floors to enter the window of a cigar factory, tracks across a room, and then leaves through another window and 'flies' slowly along the street at roof level several stories up. The sound design is also frequently remarkable.

Inevitably, the film was condemned for 'formalism' (the number one crime for a Soviet artist - Shostavokitch was also accused of it). It was rescued from obscurity in the 1990s by enthusiasts including Martin Scorsese.

Mac stuff

Just got to grips with iMovie 09 as I've been training teachers with it at the Apple Teacher Institute in Cheltenham. It really is a huge improvement on last year's version, and I'm looking forward to working out how to use it in the classroom. Green screen, the new video effects, and titles look remarkably professional, and the video stabilisation feature makes good handheld footage look like it was shot with Steadicam. With cutaways and the ability to edit to the beat, it's good enough to use for A-level Media Studies coursework and is the obvious solution.

It's an economical solution if you buy the cheapest Mac laptop (the MacBook White) which now has the same processor and graphics card as the shiny new aluminium ones. This means it should be pretty future-proof - I had avoided buying them because of the lack of a powerful graphics card, as this will be increasingly important in future Mac OS versions and programs. It's also past-proof as it has a Firewire card for connecting a miniDV camera, unlike its more expensive sibling.

Final Cut Express is 'sick'

or so say the young people I'm working with in Fairwater, Cardiff over half term. They've created music in Garageband and they're now making montages to edit to the rhythm, and they are fascinated by the possibilities of compositing. (Sick, by the way, is a term of approval - see www.urbandictionary.com). I'll be posting some of their work on our project blog within the next few days.

Art of the Title

Just found this extremely useful site. It's all about movie title sequences. You can view them (some in hi-def), and if you click on the 'Direct Link' you can download the sequence in good quality QuickTime format. There are some classic examples there - look at the Soylent Green montage to see just what you can do with music, still images and Ken Burns-style effects. At the other end of the technological scale is the stunning 3D animation sequence for the Russian film Novaya Zemla.