Notes from our second session - before you had all decided to record and take notes yourselves!

What was exciting about the film trailers we watched?

o Music – exciting, creates atmosphere, goes with the film.
o Special effects – concentrating on a really important object, character or symbol (e.g. sparkling diamond).
o Memorable visual introduction, often of words (e.g. Star Wars)
o Funny / comedy
o Effects to make it look old (Pirates of the Caribbean)
o A motto at the end
o Visually communicating the idea of fun
o Bright and colourful
o Describing what the film is about and encouraging you to watch it
o Like a shortened version of the film – snapshots
o Introduces the main characters
o Musical timing – fits with the events that are shown on screen (e.g. Ice Age)
o Weird noises and sound effects
o Creates anticipation and curiosity about what will happen in the film
o Different music for different characters

What is a BLOG?

o From Web Log – shortened to blog
o An online daily or regularly updated diary or account

Storyboards

o Telling a story – but with pictures
o Similar looking to a comic strip
o Usually the plan for a film
o A sequence of pictures to tell the outline of a story

Team Present – What was good about the packaging of the DVDs we looked at?

o A main character or thing from the story big and detailed in the foreground – often the thing that the film is about
o Showing other things from the film in the background
o Fonts , font effects and logos
o Colours creating atmosphere(e.g. bright or dark)

Buddies Takeover - This planning document shows the original team briefs and introduction to the work...

Dear year 5s and 4s,

This year we are asking you to be responsible for producing the Buddies DVD that will be sent out to the Little Ones who start school next September.

To do this we have divided you into 5 Production Teams. Each team will be responsible for a different part of making the DVD.

The teams will be working with Lawrence Hallett and Mark Walker.

Lawerence has done a lot of work with businesses and football teams to help them to achieve their aims. He will be working with you to decide what you want to do and how you are going to achieve it.

Mark, is a filmmaker, and will be working with you all to help with filming, editing, sound and design.

We want you to decide how the DVD is made, but there a few guidelines for what it needs to achieve below. We also want you to be thinking carefully about what the Little Ones will need to see in the DVD. This is a big responsibility for you all, but we know that you can do it!
Good luck!

Deborah at Creative Partnerships


The DVD Brief:

Produce a short film that introduces you (the Big Ones) to the Little Ones who will start school in September 2007. The film needs to:

Explain what the Buddies Scheme is and why it is helpful.
Show who you all are and what you are like, and how you will help the Little Ones.
Show what Newnham School is like.
Introduce other people that they will meet when they start school.
Tell the Little Ones things they need to know about the school.
Make them feel excited and happy about starting school.



Team Visual
Brief:

To create the visual filmed footage for the film. You will need to work with Mark to learn how to do this and to carry it out. This will include:

Filming to introduce the Year 5’s to their little ones. This could be using interviews or another method.

Filming to introduce other important people. Team Content will help decide who these are. This could be using interviews or another method.

Filming to explain about the Buddies Scheme. Team Content will help decide how to do this.

Filming parts of the school and action within the school. Team Content will advise what these are.

You will need to organise when and how to do this filming and ensure that people know, and are available, and that events are happening etc. Producing filming schedules might help.

Team Audio
Brief:

You will be responsible for all audio material for the film, deciding what is suitable and making recordings. You will need to work with Mark to learn how to do this and to carry it out. This will include:

Music and soundtracks. You will need to be aware of copyright issues here.

Producing scripts for the voice-overs. You will need to liaise with Team Content over what they decide to include in the film, because this will inform what you produce scripts about.

Deciding how the voice-overs are recorded and how you decide on the most suitable people to speak them. You may want everyone to have a go, or you may want to organise auditions?

Recording the finished voice-overs. Quality control.



Team Content
Brief:

It is your job to decide what needs to be included in the film and to pass that information on to the relevant team. You will have a lot of liaising to do and will need to decide the best way of communicating between teams. Your work should involve:

Consultation and research. Finding what different people think should be in the DVD. You might want to consult: current reception children, reception parents, teachers, other year 5s. You will need to decide the best ways to gather this information. Use whatever tools you can, including DVD camera, stills camera, sound recording.

Thinking about what the needs of the DVD are: Who is it for? What do you need to communicate? What impression do you want to give?

You will need to use your thoughts and your research to decide what the content of the DVD will be, including:

Which people in the school is it important to include, apart from the Big-Ones?
How to show what the Buddies Scheme is and what it is for.
What parts of the school need to be shown?
What actions and events need to be shown?


You will need to pass on this information to and liaise with the relevant teams, especially Team Visual and Team Audio.

You will need to work with Mark on deciding the running order, and how the finished film is edited.



Team Present
Brief:

You will be responsible for the finished presentation of the DVD, its reproduction and distribution, and sharing with audiences. You will need to:

Decided on how the DVD will be packaged. Research products. Talk to Mr. Doctor and Mrs. Powell about any products you need ordering, and what your budget is.

Decide on the design of the DVD. Who will produce this? You may want to work on it together? You may want to set a brief and run a competition?

Deciding what information needs to be included with the DVD and producing this. You will need to liaise with other team, school staff, and Deborah from Creative Partnerships.

Print DVD packaging and the DVD labels.

Write multiple copies of the DVD.

Distribution: How many copies are needed, who do they need to go to?

How can we celebrate and share the finished work with other audiences? You may want to organise an event?

Publicising the Buddies work that is happening with Creative Partnerships at Newnham school.



Team Document
Brief:

You are all responsible for documenting the process of making the Buddies DVD. We want to you to capture evidence of what the year 5s are doing and what they think about it. To do this you will have:

A digital stills camera
A digital sound recorder
Any other recording methods you want to use.
Photographer Roland Dowding will be helping you to learn more about photography.
The school’s DVD camera.

We also want you to be responsible for evaluating the work in September 2007. This means finding out:

What use the DVD is to the Little Ones it was made for?

What parents thought of the DVD?

What you and the year five’s think about the project to make the Buddies DVD? What you all learned? How it has changed you all? Why it is different to the way other projects might work?

What effect the Buddies work with Creative Partnerships has had on you school?

Feedback from teachers, parent and pupils. Maybe by recording interviews or group discussions.

You will need to liaise with Deborah from Creative Partnerships on the evaluation of the project.

We also want you to work with Mark to produce a finished product to bring together your work.

Planning of Buddies Takeover

Deb, Lawrence and Mark had a meeting on Friday to review how the work at Newnham school is going and plan for the next few sessions. Now that Mark is going to be around to help with the work more, that is another person for us all to communicate with!

It was a great meeting! We are all so pleased about how the work is progressing. And this blog is really fantastic. We talked about using the blog for us all to share how the Buddies DVD work is going - so it becomes a huge record of what the project is like from lots of different points of view. What do you think?

I (Deb) decided that I'm going to try and add some of the planning documents to the blog for everyone to be able to see. Everyone learned so much from working on the Buddies DVD last school year, that we were able to plan a way of making the DVD this year - with all the pupils having total control of every aspect of the production.

Feb 13th - A busy week

This week 3 of the teams have been working on the project:

Team Document
They have created this blog and updated all the ongoing activity - They also co-ordinated all the great pics on the site - More to be added to make sure everyones pic is on the site

Team Content
Working hard at the moment so we can film straight after half term. This week the group have decided the 3 most important questions that parents will want answered by the dvd - This started with a long list and the team chose the following 3 key questions as the most important:
1. What is the school like?
2. What is the Buddy system?
3. What are school dinners like?

Team content are now busy creating a storyboard of how the above 3 questions can be filmed and answered

Team Present
They have been busy finding their favorite fonts - Impact bold Italics is their Favorite at the moment - Each of theteam is now working on a possible design for the DVD packaging - Jack is a little ahead - see his artwork below

Feb 13th - Jacks Artwork

1 of teams is responsible for the presentation of the DVD - Team member Jack has produced the stunning design above

14th February 2007

The picture in the centre is the 4 girls who made this blog. The picture on the left is of mark the camera man.

This is the content team.

13th February 2007

The team on the left is Present team. The team in the centre is Visual team.

The story so far

Last week was the 30th of January 2007 on that day we talked about what a blog is and what a movie trailer is about. 6th february 2007. We took some photes of the the diffrent teams and put them on the buddy board.They split us up into diffrent groups so we could do diffrent things.The other group did sound and listening. The adults who teach us are called Deborah cook and Lawrence Hallett.The first week we started, we discused what sort of things we were going to do during the making of the buddy D.V.D the buddy project is where a year six looks after a reception child for their first year.

6th february 2007

Today we had a short meeting, with Deb Cook and Lawrence Hallett. Deb
and Lawrence had the idea of splitting the Document team into three
diffrent teams, so that we could do diffrent things. One group does
camera another does voice recording and the last group does a daily blog
about what has been done about the buddy project.Today Deb's group did
the voice recording And the blog group did theres to

30th January 2007

Today we have had a meeting about the buddy DVD with Lawrence Hallett
and Deborah Cook. Each week Deb and Lawrence give us homework to
do during the week. This week our homework was to watch a movie trailer
and write if it was exciting or boring, do an ideas page and find out what a
blog is.