Students in the Limkokwing Global Campus programme in London recently attended an intensive two and a half days film production workshop titled ‘Sound On/Vision Off’.
The ‘Sound On/Vision Off’ workshop, held from 9 – 11 February 2015, was run by Into Film, in association with the British Film Institute, Bradford Media Literacy Project and NI Creative Learning Centres. Into Film is a newly established charity formed from a merger of two charity organisations, FILMCLUB and First Light.
FILMCLUB was an educational charity project which set up after-school film clubs around the UK with 7000 schools joined. It gave students access to thousands of films from blockbusters to black & white and foreign language films, as well as sending film industry professionals into schools to run workshops with the children.
First Light was a charity initiative aimed at empowerment and engagement of young people in the design, delivery and evaluation of film education activity. Key to this was enabling them to create their own film and digital media content; the chance to tell their own stories in their own voice.
The two charities joined forces to facilitate the British Film Institute (BFI)’s 5-19 Film Education scheme in 2012. Following their success with that project, they fully merged in September 2013 to become Into Film.
The first day of the workshop discussed Film Language, focusing on editing and character movement. The first activity of the day was the ‘Five Shots Exercise’, where students were expected to use a camera to shoot five shots, without any editing; and to create a short film of no more than two minutes using only two props. The activity was followed by a discussion of different editing styles, with particular reference to how the pace of editing informs the audience’s perception of the passage of time.
The next day’s discussions was focused on set design and music within movies. This was followed by an activity where students had to create an imaginative set design using paper cut-outs for the film ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’.
The workshop greatly emphasises film as a teaching tool to encourage deep and active learning, and facilitating students to take control of their own learning processes. It highlighted the power of film in engaging participant, broadening viewers’ horizons, and feeding their cultural education.
At the end of the workshop students received a UK-recognised Continuing Professional Development (CPD) certificate from Dr. Steve Connolly, Educational Writing and Training Facilitator at BFI and Into Film.
