2011 Spring 8th graders Silent Films

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My students created films that were inspired by the Silent Film genre.After analyzing the works of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Birth of a Nation, they then broke up into groups of four to each fulfill a film makers role: Director, Producer, Cinematographer and Actor/Writer.

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The students and I also had a great time going through various facets of the film making process, in particular, the acting games where they performed charades, pantomine and various other acting games to get them using their bodies to tell a story, rather than their voices.

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I feel like my students got really frustrated with the whole editing process, as some of their files were deleted, misplaced or somehow just disappeared due to one reason or another. After doing this project two times already, I will instead make sure that the students simultaneously upload to Dropbox and Jaycut.

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But overall, I was really happy with the work they put out this time around. We got more videos than I did last time, in fact, I was able to get every student to upload their film to You Tube.

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Feel free to click on one of these files if you would like to download it. Or you can scroll through the You Tube versions on the Embedr playlist above.

when_hide_and_seek_gets_serious.mp4 Watch on Posterous

I was also pleased to see that the students were able to utilize the green screen / chroma key feature in Jaycut. The students who made the "Last Mountain Dew" video utilized it to take advantage of a rainy day and shoot inside, and the group who made "Hide and Go seek..." where able to send students in environments that they didn't think possible.

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