I feel the need to be mean and uncharitable. It’s been that sort of week.
With a few exceptions, all the videos of school productions I’ve seen have been unwatchable tosh. It’s a shame because you know that it’s been a labour or love for staff and students and they’ve thought “let’s preserve this, let’s film it” but what you end up with is mess that doesn’t really do the production justice.
Actually, there is a point to this. I was having a discussion with one of our partner teachers about documenting work done for their Arts Award submission and it got me thinking.
Filming a stage show well is REALLY tricky. You have problems with bad light, dodgy sound, audience noise and the like. Most schools either stick a single camera at the back of the hall and let it run or try to use a few cameras. We’ve helped one of our schools do it using a 3 camera setup but it’s time consuming to sync the footage then edit it together (the students used Adobe Premiere CS3). The editors just got bored wading through what in the end was 5 hours of raw footage and it wasn’t really a great use of their time.
So what other options do you have?
Assuming your aim is to have some sort of record for posterity of the event you can use loads of different tools.
Learning Platform – use your platform to create a mini-site for the production. Most platforms will allow you to blog, have discussion forums, display media and keep tabs on relevant dates. It will also give you the opportunity to link to web pages on the play itself, sites that talk about acting/singing/dancing technique. It gives a great opportunity to widen the community involved in the production.
Photo-sharing – having good quality images of the rehearsal process and the maybe from the tech rehearsal as well is actually a much better record of the activity. Most of the fun and enduring memories come from the rehearsing anyway. Use Flickr or Picasa Web Albums for starters although there are loads of others.
Blogging – why not have people involved contributing to a group blog about the production from day 1? This will give you a great reflective record of the highs and lows of the whole process. Use your school’s learning platform blogs, Edublogs or WordPress. (Edublogs actually runs on the WordPress engine but is set up for school use). Alternatively, for UK schools, your regional grid for learning may have a system for setting up blogs for you.
Video – I’m not dismissing video out of hand; there are alternatives to just sticking a camera in the hall and hoping for the best. Why not try do a “Making of…” documentary using some footage of rehearsals, video diaries and photo slideshows. Alternatively, link up with your school’s media department and get their students to do a proper film of a small section of the play using a few camera angles and properly edited. I’m having a bit of fun with Fliggo at the moment for hosting short videos in a reasonably secure environment that I can access for embedding in blogs or sharing with people.
How has your school or college used ICT alongside your production?
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