CREATIVE DEVICES
Some examples the kids came up with were ‘How to make a nether portal’, ‘How to make a veggie garden’, ‘How to make a light beacon’ and ‘How to make an underground base’.
I have been teaching Media Arts for over two years now, and video production (or ‘movie making’, as we call it in the younger years) is probably the unit that engages the kids the most. My teaching philosophy has always been to never dumb it down. When I teach video production, I am not just teaching kids shooting and editing; instead, we go through the process, I teach them skills and concepts, and we talk about shot composition, camera angles, narrative structure, editorial techniques and post-production workflows. If all that sounds really complicated, it is, absolutely. But this all comes from my edict that I want to turn the students from pure consumers of video into creators and ultimately critics as well.
I will cover how I teach the basics in younger year levels in a later article, but, for now, what follows is a guide to the main apps – all from Adobe – that we stick to in my Year 3 to Year 6 classes, which is when we start getting serious about video production.
