Cal and I reviewed a few films on point of view, and also saw a short film about a Mark Twain story I had assigned to Cal.

Cal and I discussed the different elements of a story that are also found in film. We focused on dialect that was not written about in America until Mark Twain in the mid-1800s. We also discussed the relationship of photography with videography.

Cal and I got to know about each other's interest and background in filmmaking. We discussed various elements of filmmaking, including the framing of photography to emphasize mood.

Hunter spent this session filming and editing his final claymation project.

Today is Juno Beach Prep School's Earth Day celebration.

Hunter spent most of today's lesson sculpting the props and characters to use in his claymation. He successfully completed filming the first scene with multiple characters, angles and camera movements.

Hunter finished analyzing "The Perfect Game" movie and completed the film analysis handout and discussion. He then planned out his next claymation movie step by step, characters, stage design, props, and scenes. He then started building the stage props.

Today Hunter learned about establishing shots, the use of filters to convey meaning in film and nondiegetic v. diegetic sound. We analyzed a film, The Perfect Game, for plot, the sociocultural underpinnings of the setting, and character development amongst other things. Hunter was asked to complete a worksheet on his observations. We will finish the film on Friday.

Hunter and I watched a short claymation (clay animation) to introduce the concept. I taught Hunter that every second in a movie is actually 24 frames (stills). Then Hunter started working with the clay to make a figure. I taught him how to set up the tripod and attach the camcorder and set the mode to photography. I let him come up with the action for the claymation step by step as we took pictures. Then we uploaded the images to the computer, edited the clips, and added sound. When the short movie was finished, Hunter took a lot of pride in showing it to everybody he could grab in the building. At the end of class, we spent some time watching more intricate and longer claymations and discussed how we could make his next project better.
I could tell Hunter really liked the project.

After taking into account Hunter's feelings about film, we decided to take the class in the direction of film analysis rather than output. During this class we watched two short films from the Cannes Film Festival. The first was very symbolic about identity during high school. The second was an animated film about child soldiers. Both films were extremely poetic in their visual and narrative style. Hunter was not that impressed by the style, but the topic of child soldiers came up and we talked about the realities of this in Africa. This led to us talking about the activist film KONY 2012. We watched it and discussed why the filmmaker chose to include his son in the film, whether or not the film's calling for activism from the audience was effective, and whether the film achieved its purpose: to capture Joseph Kony, Ugandan War Criminal. This led us to researching the history of the Ugandan Civil War as well. We spoke of the style of the film and the use of images and newspapers to tell the story.
Next, we watched an animated TED talk called "Changing Education Paradigms" and then discussed how the speaker, Ken Robinson, outlined his argument.