Bennett Elementary School Video Project
In the spring of 1995, my High School Media Production class volunteered to help a class of 5th graders from Bennett Elementary make a video about their school. It began with breaking up the class into small groups and teaching the kids the basics in handling a video camera, we then allowed them to take the cameras around their school. With over 30 "videographers" the kids filmed their favorite places around school, as well as, interviews with teachers and staff.
Continuing the education in video production we brought the class in to log their own tapes. At this point I saw a level of disorder and lack of interest in the other High School students to continue in the project. Feeling a level of responsibility to get the video finished I talked to the teacher at the Elementary school and put together an outline of what her expectations were.
Unable to make any sense of the tape logs I re-logged the student's tapes (getting seasick twice) and transcribed the interviews. From this I created an image of what the video would look like and prepared a list of shots still needed to finish the show. The other High School students helped in getting the last shots. When came the time to edit the video the Bennett students were sent to the High School in groups of 3 to 5. They brought with them music they wanted and I spent time with each group teaching them how to work the simple editing equipment and supervised them as they began to piece together the video. With each new group the students were getting more and more excited with the results, reporting to me that word around class said the video was "really cool."
As a final touch I added some opening animation created in Lightwave on Media Production's Video Toaster. On the last day of school they played the finished product, complete with a credit roll that included their names.
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