mrmayo.org

2010 Film Festival

mrmayo — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:23:24 +0000

Last week, our school community came out to watch two and a half hours of films created by my 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. We packed the theatre with close to 400 people for our 2nd annual film festival. I love teaching this film literacy class because we get to show off what middle school students are truly capable of. The one comment I heard over and over again from parents was how impressed they were with the quality of the student films, and how well-developed and engaging the plots were.

My students put a lot of work and time into carefully planning their stories and writing their scripts. It took almost four months to create these films. It’s demanding to ask middle school students to stay with a project for that long. Creating a short film with a clear, well-developed plot is a tough process. All the students who completed their films should be extremely proud.

We also surpassed our fund-raising goal. We raised over $1,800 dollars this year through donations and concession sales. After we donated $500 to the American Film Institute, we have $1,300 left over to buy new equipment for next year. Here’s one of the films shown at the festival, Clone for Life:

To see more student films check out our class website, Watch Out! Over the next week we will be posting all the student films created in the last four months. Thanks to everyone who volunteered to help out and make our 2nd annual film festival a success. Let’s do it again next year!

We Can Do This!

mrmayo — Fri, 28 May 2010 01:08:16 +0000

Can middle school students create interesting, engaging, well-made short films? Can they have their very own film festival at an actual movie theatre and invite 300 plus people from the community to attend? Is this possible? Of course it is!

We are just about done putting our film festival together. We remixed this old black and white film noir movie from 1949, D.O.A. This short video is part of the introduction for our upcoming film festival. I downloaded the film from the Internet Archives website. The film is licensed No Rights Reserved under Creative Commons. No Rights Reserved means you are free to do whatever you want with the video. You can download it, slice it up, overdub voiceovers, and post the finished product online.

If anyone doubts whether middle school students are capable of creating compelling, interesting short films, stay tuned. We will be posting all the films on our class website next week after our film festival.

Please, turn off all cellphones.

mrmayo — Sun, 02 May 2010 01:57:03 +0000

Longfellow Ten veteran, VHD, recently completed this cell phone PSA for our upcoming film festival. I wasn’t sure he could actually top last year’s cell phone PSA, but he managed to do so. This is just one of many short pieces we are putting together for our film festival. We have a TON of work left to do in the next four weeks. Students are filming Act III of their movies next week. They have been working on these short films for about three months now.

It’s challenging to create short, concise 6 to 8 minute films. Everyone has been doing a great job and I can’t wait to see all the films on the big screen. I think we’re all feeling the pressure at the moment. It’s a bit stressful, but it’s also a lot of fun.

SPACE, Issue 5

mrmayo — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:07:36 +0000

For the last two years, my students and I have published a digital literary magazine called Space. Students from across the country, and even other countries, have submitted all sorts of original digital work to the magazine. This year, we are too busy preparing for our upcoming film festival to put an issue of Space out. Fortunately, my friend Susan Morgan and her middle school students in Virginia have volunteered to put out Issue 5 of Space.

The idea of Space is simple. It’s an opportunity for students to share their digital creations with the world and each other. To submit work, simply visit the homepage for this issue of Space and leave a comment. In the comment add a link to your work indicating the category (poetry, personal narrative, short story, digital art, photography, essay, animation). Each submission must also include the student’s first name, and either the school they attend or the state or country they live in. All submissions are due by May 17th.

A few of my students have already started working on their submissions for this issue of SPACE.

Controlled Chaos

mrmayo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 02:29:01 +0000

We’re in the middle of our big film project right now in my film literacy classes. Students have spent a good amount of time in pre-production brainstorming story and character ideas, writing scripts and creating storyboards for all their scenes. It appears all their hard work is paying off. They have been very focused, prepared and engaged all week filming their movies. Students used Google Docs again this year to collaboratively write their scripts. All of the individual scripts are linked in the sidebar of our homepage on our class website, Watch Out! I’m always amazed to see how efficiently students use Google Docs, and communicate with one another as their scripts evolve. We use a script writing structure I’ve written about a few times before called The Mythic Journey Map, developed by NYU professor Marilyn Horowitz. It’s very helpful for the students to have a basic structure to follow as they hammer out their scripts.

It’s exciting watching them enthusiastically bring their scripts to life. I can’t wait to see how they all turn out. (7 weeks until our 2nd annual film festival. YIKES!)

Back to Work

mrmayo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:34:55 +0000

Hard to believe I’ve been back at work for almost two full weeks. My nine week paternity leave flew by. I’m posting this picture of my daughter for those students who have been asking to see her. She is about five and a half months old in this picture. It was a great experience, but it’s also good to be back at work! I was very happy to hear that my students all worked hard when I was gone. I was also very glad to see our classroom plants were well taken care of.

LF10 T-Shirts

mrmayo — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:12:16 +0000

Our official LF10 club t-shirts have finally arrived direct from Squidfire. I’m out of the building for the next two months on paternity leave so please see Mr. Stelzner to purchase your shirt. The shirts come in three colors, a variety of sizes, and cost $10. Get yours now, while supplies last!

The guys at Squidfire were kind enough to take some pictures of the silk screening process used to make our shirts. I used Animoto to quickly make the little video:

The Longfellow Ten Figurative Language Challenge!

mrmayo — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:11:14 +0000

The Longfellow Ten is kicking off a stop-motion figurative language challenge. The idea is simple: Create a short, clear, creative stop-motion video depicting an example of a type of figurative language. For more details about this challenge READ THIS.

It’s rumored the Midwest Collective of the LF10 is wrapping up production on a number of new films. Stay tuned for further LF10 developments…

Rare Silent Film Collection Discovered!

mrmayo — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:51:25 +0000

An extremely rare collection of silent films was recently discovered in the vaults of the United Artists Archives in Hollywood, California. What makes these silent films unusual is that they appear to be produced, directed, and edited by middle school students. The film shown above, The Fight for Love, is one of the examples from this rare collection. These films have caused a huge controversy among film historians because of disagreement about their authenticity.

Evidence from the films themselves show they were most likely created in the 1920s. For one thing, the music used in these films are old 78rpm cylinder recordings from the same era. The films also use the same camera angles that were prevalent in silent movies during this period, such as full body shots, two-shots, medium-shots, and close-ups. The characters are straight out of the silent film era: vagabonds and hobo muggers, pick-pockets, thieves, characters down on their luck, and jealous suitors.

The films are very scratchy, and have an aged film look to them that would be impossible to imitate. I, for one, think they are the real thing, and I’m amazed they were actually created by middle school students. Check out the rest of these newly discovered silent films on our class website, Watch Out!, and decide for yourself.

Guest Professor via Skype

mrmayo — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:23:54 +0000

“If you are not interested in your story, I guarantee you no one else will be.”

The quote above is from Marilyn Horowitz, NYU film professor, writing coach, and author of the book we use in my middle school film class, How to Write a Screenplay in Ten Weeks (The Middle School Edition). Ms. Horowitz was kind enough to take the time recently to skype into our classroom and give my 6th and 7th graders a 40-minute lesson on storytelling and character development.

We’ve skyped many times in the past, but this was the first time that someone has Skyped into our classroom and literally taught a lesson. Ms. Horowitz had my 6th and 7th graders taking notes, and she did a great job connecting with the students. I’ve edited the 42-minute Skype lesson into this 10-minute video. I tried to capture some of the main points of the lesson.

I’m also posting a short audio clip that was edited out of the video. This clip has a helpful writing exercise Ms. Horowitz recommended to get the students thinking about their favorite stories. We’ll definitely try this out in class in the coming weeks as we start thinking about the stories we want to craft for our big movie project coming up.