Planning your project

Topics

The first thing that you might want to consider is the type or genre of videos that will be produced by your class.

Will they be a documentaries, Public Service Announcements (PSA), instructional videos, or something fictional? Once this is decided you might want to narrow down topics and form groups. One way of doing this would be to have a class discussion of topics and having groups form around the chosen topics. For example, if you decide that the class should do PSAs, topics might be:

  • The Environment
  • Youth Issues
  • Politics
  • Health
  • Human Rights

Or you might choose one of the above and get more specific, e.g. if you chose The Environment you might have a list of subtopics such as:

  • Alternate Energy
  • Climate Change
  • Conservation
  • Farming
  • Pollution

Groups

The groups will have the task of brainstorming, researching and ultimately choosing the specific and narrowed down subject of their film.

Groups might be introduced to the idea that in creating a movie there are different roles, e.g. writers, artists, musicians, actors, camera operators, editors and special effects people. If this is an advanced group who have done video projects before they might divide the tasks at the start. In general, however, I prefer to have everyone do a bit of all of the jobs. This allows each person to get an introduction to a specific role with hands on experiencing.

Equipment

Here’s what you need at the minimum:

  • At least one camcorder.There are many on the market and unless you have a large budget, a fairly basic consumer camcorder will be fine. Features that you might want to look for include: viewfinder and lcd display, zoom, and external audio input. Storage might be on a digital tape, dvd, or flash memory.
    You may have an older Analog camcorder which can be used too. However, in this case you will need a converter box that takes the audio/video output of the camcorder and converts it to digital to send to your computer via firewire or usb.
  • A fairly modern computer.Processing digital video is one of the most intensive computer operations there is. You will want to get your hands on the fastest computer that you can. In addition you want as much memory (RAM) as possible and a large amount of hard drive space (you might want to get an external hard drive for your projects). Video editing can be done on just about any platform. There are several applications available for Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems. Although you might be able to get away with less (actually… I have worked on 500 MHz machines but it’s very slow), I would recommend at minimum:
    • Processor Speed: 1 GHz
    • RAM: 512 MB
    • Hard Drive: 80 GB (7200 RPM if possible)
    • Video Capture Card / Firewire (possibly built in)
  • Video Editing Software (e.g. iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, Open Movie Editor, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut)

Recommended:

  • Tripod
  • External microphone
  • Lighting
  • CD/DVD writer

Other Tools and Resources

  • Graphics software
    For example an image editor and a drawing application. Examples of these kinds of programs are Photoshop and Illustrator. There are also Open Source alternatives such as GIMP and Inkscape. These programs can be used to prepare still images for use in your movie (can you name a film maker known for making entire movies out of still images?) or creating other types of graphics like illustrations, more advanced title screens, etc.
  • Music and Audio production software
    Some video editing applications have quite advanced audio tools, others have just the minimum. For advanced layering of audio, you might want to use an application like Audacity (we will talk more about this later). You might also want to have the students create their own music. Music creation programs like Garageband for the Mac will do fine. There are similar commercial applications for Windows and a larger number of free ones for Linux. Personally, I have found that the students love creating their own music.
  • Free Images
    The Creative Commons site has a list of websites that feature images that can reused. Some require attribution, some do not. This is a good starting point - there are others, even many of the pictures on Flickr have a CC type license and can be used.
  • Free Movie clips
    The Moving Images Archive at the Internet Archive (archive.org) site has a large selection of movies that can be downloaded and reused, in particular the Prelinger Archives has many educational movies - many which I’ve seen portions of showing up in other films. The Open Video Project has links to many videos that can be reused. While not advertised as “free”, some holders of copyright will allow reuse of materials for educational purposes. One time while teaching digital media to students in Brooklyn, a group wanted a scene of a house burning down in their movie. After finding one on YouTube, they contacted the owner (which happened to be a news channel) and explained how they wanted to use it. The news station sent them back a letter with permission to use the clip for this purpose.

For inspiration and discussion

I often find it useful to see what other people are doing. Here are some places that have videos that you might want to watch as a group and discuss:

  1. Media that Matters Film Festival
    One of my favorites. Featuring a variety of movies with a message.
  2. Listen Up!
    Many student created videos on a variety of topics.
  3. Youth Media Institute
    Seattle based youth media group. Several student created PSAs are here.
  4. Our NBC Universal Digital Media Competition entries from past years