Wrapping up the school year with a movie project

Evangeline had her big motion picture debut today with her final research project for the school year.

For her project this time around, Evangeline decided she wanted to research movies. I never need to encourage her much to try new things, and since everyone else does the poster presentations (and since she already did one poster, and a written paper), I turned her this time onto the idea of making a movie that she could show to explain how movies are made.

We started the work back in April, actually, with a few phone calls that finally led to Evangeline videotaping an interview in early May with a close personal friend of mine named Tim who makes movies from man-in-the-street interviews for his church.

She also interviewed her little sister, who reciprocated and interviewed Evangeline herself, about why she enjoys movies, and what her favorite movies are. She also read two books about making movies, and to cap it all off, we made a stop-motion animation movie using our refrigerator magnets.

When we finished that stage, Evangeline had 25 minutes' worth of footage on our video camera.

About a week ago, Tim came over and loaded the entire video onto his laptop computer, and we began the painstaking process of editing the movie into its final format. That began with the setup, where we deleted clips from the girls' interviews with one another to get rid of extra silence and repeated sentences, rearranging the remaining clips so that everything flowed nicely, and adding the opening credits.

The actual movie went pretty smoothly. Tim was a great interview, and gave Evangeline all sorts of useful information about how he makes his movies, from describing the filming and editing process, to showing her how he could add special effects, and even videotaping her videotaping him.

We cut a few snippets out here and there -- Tim let slip the seven-letter W/M word, for example -- and Evangeline had a hard time keeping the camera focused on him, so we got rid of some footage of the floor and his lap -- but by and large this went nicely.

The third and final section began with Evangeline's description of how we made the animation movie -- including the bit that it took us close to 25 minutes to make a 25-second clip -- followed by the animation itself.

Bridging the sections were black screens with section names, dubbed over with music -- Tim also added some sound effects to the animation, which included a Toys for Tots train accident, and a snake made of several of our magnets -- and closing it all out were some end credits to all those involved in the movie, including the composers whose music we used, and that was that.

Because of the nature of the work, Evangeline didn't personally do the same percentage of the work on this project as she did on the others, but she still was involved in the entire process.

Tim let her delete individual clips under his supervision, she conducted the entire interview, and we followed her direction on each stage of the editing process, although we always provided guidance and recommendations. All told, it was still a heady learning experience for her.

She was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, and on Wednesday it paid off. After the school installed Apple Quicktime for Windows on a PC in her classroom, she showed her presentation to the class, answered a few questions from the students, and was still riding high at the end of the day.

I'm getting a DVD copy for ourselves, and probably for grandparents as well. If I ever feel like it when I have access to a high-speed connection, I may even put the video up on the Internet for others to watch if they feel so inclined.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.