Comic Books and Movie Making

Our second week of summer tech. camps is about to kick off. I'm really excited about this one as I get to work with the elementary PE teacher, my long time friend since high school. This week's theme is Comic Books and Movie Making. I love this combination, not because I want the kids to make a movie about comic book heroes as the rest of Hollywood is doing these days, but because it gets students to focus on the planning of making movies and good digital story telling strategies. We use a lot of different technologies to plan, create, edit and publish these Comic Books and Movies. This week's camp runs Mon. - Fri. from 8:00am - 2:30pm. We have a great group of 8 kids that are eager to learn about how to create movie magic and glossy comic book pages. The combination is perfect! Marco Torres once said, "It is much easier to take an eraser to a blueprint, then it is to take a pick ax to a foundation." In other words, planning is the key building block to a successful project. I use comic books to teach about storyboarding with making movies and digital storytelling.

The students will first learn how to use Comic Life and all of it's features to create their very own Comic Book. Illustrations can come from anywhere. They can be drawn in an illustration program such as Kidpix, Tuxpaint, Clicker Paint, etc. or even free hand drawn and scanned in. Other students may decide to use Photobooth to create comic like drawings of themselves or toys that they bring in to tell their comic stories. We will learn the differences between speech bubbles and transition text to tell the story in a comic book. This is just foreshadowing to our storyboarding techniques that we will use to create our class movie as well.

For movie making, I usually start with a video that I created with the tech. ed. at my old district called, How to Make a Movie. This teaches the basic steps to digital storytelling for elementary students in a humorous way. (For more information and resources on digital storytelling view our team taught web page on digital storytelling from our ACTEM presentation in Augusta, Maine in October 2010.)

I have used Brainpop's videos as well to help illustrate the steps in movie making, especially when talking about at the professional level. The students and I then scour the Internet for a story to use, as creating one itself could take weeks by itself. If I were to teach this project within the classroom, I would certainly prefer the students to develop a story they had written in language arts and create a digital story out of it, but as I only have 5 shortened days with them it is much better to rely on other resources. For this reason, I have found that Aaron Shepard's Reader's Theater web page works great for creating elementary movies. In fact, last summer we used his story, "The Boy Who Wanted the Willies" to create our summer movie and it worked out great. (See video below)

After our initial group processing and planning, we often use Kidspiration for the brainstorming, Comic Life or a storyboard template that Pages '11 offers to create the scenes in order on the walls of the lab, we discuss which roles each student wants. The students work on creating lists for their costumes, props and immediately start reading the script to memorize their lines. Each day, I teach a a mini course on filming, green screen techniques and movie magic. I find that by doing this, and explaining how other movies were made, it allows the students to become the real problem solvers when it comes to filming their own movie.

For example, last year we needed a scene in which a student walks up to the gates of a castle. Immediately the students said we could use the green screen. Then one student said, "Well I actually have a toy castle at home that works. Couldn't we film it with stop-motion animation to make it look like the drawbridge really works?" That just got the discussion rolling. From there we filmed the castle against a green screen and after 6 attempts we came out with the finished product in which a student walks towards the castle against the black of night as the draw bridge slowly lowers. (I have added all the steps on how the students did this in the previously mentioned digital storytelling link from above if you are curious how the students solved this problem.)

Aha moments like this, and true problem solving is what I miss the most about teaching in my own classroom, but as long as I can still offer enriching programs during the summer months and after school during the year, I will be happy.

We then edit the entire film using iMovie '11 with advanced tools checked in the preferences menu to use picture-in-a-picture and green screen techniques. (I purchased my green screen, a green cloth, on eBay for $2). After all of the voice overs, music, sound effects and video effects have been added, we burn a DVD copy that the students can create the cover art for so that they can bring it home and share with their family and friends. I also show them the process of uploading the video to a Web 2.0 resource such as Vimeo.com or YouTube.com so that family and friends far away, as well as the rest of the world, can view their finished product. They truly feel like movie stars when the whole thing is finished!