Drama 

We finish Term One with Year Two and Year Three on an absolute high as students have demonstrated their skills in Drama with proficiency and enthusiasm. 

Lets recap on Term One and why I chose filmmaking as a means to explore Drama… 

For some years now, I’ve been aware of the gap within this age-group between students who have never shot footage or displayed their thoughts, feelings or ideas visually through film, and alternatively the students who are already at this young age shooting and editing their own extremely impressive short films! So, it was this area that I chose to focus on. 

Film production can be broken down into pre-production, recording, post-production and distribution, but as the largest and arguably most important portion sits within pre-production, this is the area that I chose to teach and assess. Depending on the progress of each class, we would then touch on recording and what could be done to produce quality footage ready for editing. 

Classes were guided through a group meditation where each student was tasked with focusing on a character that they would really love to play. This could be a spin on a character already in existence or a completely new and unique character that they had simply dreamed up. We were amazed by the level of detail as students represented these characters by creating colourful, labelled drawings. Students were then placed into small groups and would discuss how their characters could possibly know each other and where they could be, thus forming the central story elements of Character, Relationship and Setting. 

Through these group discussions, basic plotlines would very quickly invent themselves. Building upon the fantastic work done in class surrounding creative writing, these plot elements were all placed into a simple Beginning/Middle/End story structure, identifying what was the problem or challenge the characters were faced with and how they went about finding a solution. Students were then tasked with creating their own dialogue - what do the characters say when faced with a problem? What do they say when trying to solve it? 

At this point we were ready to shoot! Students had great fun setting up their devices on the tripod, operating the camera and slate, and acting out the beginnings of their stories, scene by scene. We also discussed how easy it would be to recreate these conditions without the special lighting, tripods etc. so that the same level of footage could easily be captured at home.

Back in class, students were then shown an easy-to-follow tutorial on how to use iMovie to edit their footage together and add special effects and sound. This resource is now on their classroom Schoolbox pages to refer to any time. 

All in all, it was such a rewarding term and it was particularly special to see how many students had gone on to shoot footage independently and begin to use iMovie with confidence. I can’t wait to work with this amazing group of students again and develop their Drama skills even more.