Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Where the hail is my charger?

There won't be a lot of new pictures until I find my charger.

So today I took my kitchen mallet and pounded out some chicken breast tenderloins. I eat them with roasted jalape�os that are not even slightly spicey.

And right now I'm eating chicarrones with Tapatio salsa picante.

Next year, for my class' Festival de cine:

  • VHS or DVD format only!
  • Dress code!
  • Special features: Making the Video
  • Groups of exactly three
  • Music video: 100% lipsynch; camera always moves
  • Commercials: 100% dialogue, yellow subtitles
  • glossary

Calendar:

  • Week 1) Individual vision: abstract & proposal.
  • Week 2) film vocab & quiz
  • Week 3) reviews
  • Week 4) preliminary scripts due (must include all dialogue, camera work, locations, props)
  • Week 5) green light; filming
  • Week 6) editing
  • Week 7) editing hell
  • Week 8) Making the Video; scripts due 1) gracious introduction/concept 2) 60 second synopsis, 3) process, equipment, thank yous
  • Week 9) Final submission: video and final script
  • Week 10) Written reflection: process and group evaluation
  • Week 11) Film Festival--Q&A
  • Week 12) Video reviews
Red = written work.

3 comments:

Delia Christina said...

what's this class? you're teaching film? lucky dog. they let you do whatever you want.

jp 吉平 said...

Well, it's actually a short story class. It has nothing to do with film, but if you assign a video and make it all about process, you have a text-book task-based activity.

I've taught this class as a creative writing class, and I just could not keep up with all the drafts. With the video project, I get plenty of written work. Also, it takes very little class time. I give them the description and explain it to them, and then they ask "are we going to get class time to do this?" and I say "no."

The ideas that I've sketched out for next year will take up more class time than this year, but I think it will be fine.

In the Junior class, they do 120 seconds of commercial; either one 30 second spot and one 90 second spot, or three 30 second spots. The commercial has to promote some aspect of the school (real or fictional).

The Seniors take a popular song that I've picked out and make a music video for it; the focus is less about original language production. They have to memorize and understand their song in order to make a coherent video with a good lip-synch, and frankly the written and oral requirements of the project more than make up for the fact that they're not creating language on the video. The video itself is a gimmick. Don't tell!

db said...

gee, you is brilliant.