Excellent suggestion for kids and video
A post from a good discussion at DV for Teachers at 2-pop, reproduced in entirety with permission of the poster:
Re: Try poetry vids!
Mark—Monday, February 5, 2001 at 12:55 p.m.
Music videos are hard, for a first project, since they involve matching visuals to competing melodic, rhythmic, and vocal phrasing. They are also “on-line” intensive. Why not start with something a bit simpler.
Have the girls pick a short poem/lyric. Keep it under twenty or thirty lines. Break the poem/lyric up, phrase by phrase, line by line, or image by image. Brainstorm and storyboard, creating phrase-specific panels.
Have them record a ‘reading’ of the poem on camera. Import this as the audio track. Then, shoot (either in vid or still) to match the phrases/sentences/images/lines. They shots can be either literal or metaphoric.
The advantage of this assignment is that it includes poetry analysis, perspective theory, drawing, storyboarding/comic panel
rendering, photography, directing and videography.
It also means that by the time they hit the computer, after the storyboarding and shooting, they’ve made most of their editing choices. This will minimize their on-line time.
The students can be marked on their interpretation of the poem, their storyboarding skills, their drawing skills, their photographic skill, their editing skill, and their co-operative ability.
The assignment is a natural cross-curricular experiment with English. From here, students can move on to tackling their own poem, monologue, documentary, or script. Hope this helps.
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