Adopted Chinese girls in the video “Grass Born to Be Stepped On.”

Just a Little Help Needed
Hand is quick to point out that the video’s basic storyline was outstanding. The students had written the script themselves, detailing the horrific treatment of female babies in China, who are often abandoned by their parents and left to die. The girls had meticulously collected and scanned pictures from books and the Internet, and had selected music to accompany the visuals. In addition, they planned to interview and videotape one of their aunts, who had adopted two baby girls from China, and to use their own voices to narrate the story.

Hand also had won a Telly Award for “Inventing Flight,” a video-based science curriculum about the Wright Brothers, and knew a little something about how to frame and shoot a story. All the young filmmakers needed, Hand says, was a more user-friendly way to bring all of the pieces together.

“iMovie is so easy to use and intuitive, that once I showed the girls how it works, they just ran with it,” confirms Hand. “It’s just drag and drop ... It doesn’t get any better than that! Yet iMovie’s really powerful, and the effects are amazing. In almost no time, the students could extract audio from the video and play it under the still images, changing the volume up and down to create dramatic tension.”

Awards for Students and Teacher
It took only one additional day of production and two days of postproduction to retool the project. (Given that Hand’s wife had just had their first child four weeks earlier, Hand says he was particularly happy that iMovie helped the editing process go so quickly.)

The nine-minute video eventually earned the students top honors in their school’s History Day competition. Next, the four took home the third-place trophy during the statewide contest in May of 2003. Then the four completed the trifecta by winning out over 800 entries in Apple’s iLife Awards, and earning Hand the title of iLife Educator of the Year. Not a bad record for a left-brained kind of guy, he laughs.