Not quite on shoe-string budget – but close
Profiles in Success: Ringwood North Primary School
Where many other schools have the luxury of ample funding to support video production in the curriculum, Ringwood North has demonstrated clearly that brilliant outcomes can be achieved with little more than a Mac computer, iLife software and a basic video camera.
According to Leading Teacher Adam Brice, one of the project’s underlying goals was to use Apple Macs and iLife software to establish a collaborative creative environment in which all Year 6 students played an important role. He explains: “We had students working on every aspect of the CD’s production – creating the lyrics and music, recording and editing the tracks with GarageBand, sourcing the best prices on CDs, creating the music CD within iTunes…absolutely everything.”
The fact is that we simply don’t have a lot of equipment. But what the students have done with only eight Apple iMacs and programs such as iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand is really quite outstanding.
— Adam Brice, Leading Teacher
Applying the same collaborative principle used in the creation and production of Skoolz Out!, Brice and a number of other teachers introduced the Movie Magic program in 2005.
In the Movie Magic program, Years 5 and 6 students work in groups to develop original short movies covering virtually every genre of filmmaking. Comedy, suspense, animation, drama, soap operas and even reality TV are considered fair game for the student production teams’ iMovie-enabled efforts.
iMovie, though, is only one part of the equation; and a raft of Apple software is put to good use in Movie Magic. GarageBand is used extensively to create, edit and mix music and sound effects; Plasq’s Comic Life becomes an ideal storyboarding environment; Apple’s Pages word processing application for script writing; and – ultimately – iDVD to take the finished product from computer to DVD.
For many of the students’ friends and family members, Brice’s use of “outstanding” to describe the short films is probably an understatement; and if a commercial movie’s success is based on the number of “bums on seats”, then Ringwood North’s annual Short Film Festival is nothing short of being a blockbuster.
When in 2005 the school held its inaugural festival at the local 400-seat cinema, the single session left many family and friends without a seat. In 2006, with two sessions booked and with 800 people enjoying the show, demand still outstripped seat supply. It was a case of the entire and extended school community fully embracing a creative learning initiative.
Next Page: Recordings, comics and reinforcement