Shine on you crazy parents

Way back last September when I was involved in a very enthusiastic planning meeting for the second year of Paganel's 'Change School' program we talked about lots of ideas that involved parental or community engagement. So why is it that today, on my final session at Paganel this year, I find myself for the first time actually working with parents? The short answer is that those parental and community engagement activities happened, but didn't involve me.
Today's session with four parents and one member of staff was a real joy! We were creating a video record of Paganel's 'Shine Day' and all the activities that the pupils were getting involved with. We started by watching the shine day film I helped year-six pupils to make last year. We went on to a whistle stop run through of video production, interviewing skills, visual composition and story-telling before going to work. It's that incredible mix of skills, all running in parallel that make film-work so powerful as an educational process.
The group worked very hard throughout the day and produced a rush edit that was shown in a whole school assembly at about 2:30. They were all enthusiastic and remained so throughout the day, and they all want to come back to finish the edit after summer.
Just as well today ended on a high as I then got a phone call from a member of staff from another school regarding a DVD that I'd worked all hours to get ready in time for their end of year show. Not to thank me, just to point out all the ways in which they felt the work fell short of their expectations. You know, if they'd have been telling me that the children weren't happy with the work, I would have felt much more concerned.

What did the Romans ever etc.

A 'Film-Skills' session at Lord Silkin High School but also involving pupils from Sutherland and Ercall Wood Schools.
Thanks to the demise of 'Find your Talent' this project 'If These Walls Could Talk' has had a 20% budget cut and therefore tomorrows film-skills session, like last week's story-boarding session has had to be cancelled. We covered a lot in the day though, and I think that what really came through was that for the film crew, your attitude and focus are as important as the technical skills. Two students who decided to stay for the school sports day instead of attending this session have been dropped from the project as, in order to be an effective crew member, the first qualification is that you really, really, really want to be there.

Do you feel at home?

At Paganel Primary School for the 'Home' project. Two missions, document the day on video and plan my remaining sessions in this term.

Documenting sessions run by artists Chris Bishop and Bobbie Gardner, both new artists in school I think. With my 'almost residency' this year and a series of projects last year, I expect to continue working with Paganel after the summer on a smaller scale, so it's great to see new faces, new skills, new ideas and new energy coming in!

Documenting was done by Year Six pupils with the minimum of support from me. All of year six have spent a term as 'Catseyes Kids' and making weekly reports, so are all reasonably competent film-makers and could have had a good go at this without my input. I always feel they could be reaching a little further towards greatness in their films and so any advice I give is nudging them in this direction. Improving the film they are making, but hoping to improve their practice in the process. The key approaches I'm pushing are relentlessness - always having your mind on what you're filming now, or what you'll be filming next - and active, evolving planning - keeping in mind a vision for the finished film and adapting it as the shoot progresses. Those Year Sixes do like to stop and chat, they just need to keep their chat focused.

When chairs shrink...

At St Peter's today I worked with some of the pupils to develop the visual elements (backgrounds, characters and props) of our animatic while Hayley worked with the others to develop and record dialogue.
This was my third attempt to produce an animatic with pupils via a 'rostrum camera puppet show' approach, whereby characters are moved around a background on a table in real time, and filmed with a camera over-head. What I have learned improves the process each time but another big factor is skill and supervision ratios. Last time it was just me with two teachers, two TAs and two classes. This time it was Hayley and I with one teacher, one TA, one parent helper and one class. This much more manageable situation meant that the pupils were able to turn the production round in a day, overcoming communication, group working and technical problems to do so.

The chairs in the title were a part of the session picked out by Jane, the class teacher, as being particularly interesting. I asked pupil X to stand at a distance from the others and then asked them close one eye and frame pupil X's head between their fingers. They then moved this measured distance down the body to prove the 'five heads' rule of figure drawing (It turns out that the rule is actually eight heads, but five seemed to work for us! Probably explained by the facts that children's heads are proportionately larger than adult heads and that when you're looking down at someone the body and legs are somewhat foreshortened).
http://www.realcolorwheel.com/human.htm
I then asked them to frame a nearby chair and a more distant chair to prove that objects appear smaller as they move further away. I also demonstrated this by drawing a little girl the same height at different points on a background scene. She went from appearing to be a normal height in the foreground, to being nearly as tall as the castle in the background, to being a giant on the horizon!