CICFF

Congrats to my class from last year- their video "Hope for Technology" was the runner up in the Shortie Awards International Student News and Film Festival in June. After our success in that competition, we were invited to submit our film for the Chicago International Children's Film Festival.

"The CICFF is North America's largest and most celebrated film
festival devoted to films for and by kids, and it's the only
Academy®-qualifying children's film festival in the world! (That means our
winners in the short film category can go on to compete for the
Oscars®! In 2008, the Festival featured 250 of the best films and
videos for kids from 40 countries. The Festival welcomes over 26,000 Chicago
area children, adults, and educators to hundreds of screenings. More than 100 filmmakers, media professionals & celebrities attend the Festival to lead interactive workshops with kids." CICFF

I am amazed at how much this little class project has achieved! It will be shown as part of a collection of short films by kids. Click here to see the list, or look at the screen cap below. There are a lot of different countries represented! I am SO proud of their hard work.

Our First Vegas Project!

Hooray! I was able to get a simpler version of Sony Vegas Video installed on a student station. Doug and I use the full version of Vegas on our projects. You can do lots of neat effects with Vegas. This is probably my favorite video special effects wise:

Even using the stripped down version, my kids will eventually be able to green screen and scan and pan. (We will see about the pan and scan- I still have trouble with that task!) I started the kids off easy with a simple project- putting pictures with sound clips and adding transitions and music. They made the pictures and recorded the words with their first grade book buddies. I tried to explain that using a different transition for each picture is like using a different font for every word in your story. At eight years old, they think using a different font for every word in their story is very cool as opposed to distracting and looked completely dejected when I suggested they pick only one transition to use. Not wanting to stifle creativity on the first project, I let them use different ones. What can I say- I too love all the different transitions. :)


I was really impressed with how well they cropped the pictures, timed the transitions and were able to find the correct sound file and match it to the pictures. I did go back in and adjust the volume levels on some of the sound clips, add the titles (which they could have done if time permitted) and made the timings a bit sharper. This is most certainly still their work though. They even typed up the e-mail we wrote together as a class to send out to everyone.. They learned how to insert a hyperlink and the function of the caps lock button.

(Click to view picture full size)

They then wrote about how they did it all on our wiki. Check the project out and if you know any firefighters or police officers, please forward it on to them. We are keeping track of our page hits. So far in one day we are up to 16 views on each page. As as side note I should also point out that when they updated the wiki, they managed to delete every single thing on the front page and somehow lose the scroll bar. It was a fun evening activity to try and go back and make it like it was. The scroll bar is still missing in fact. Their update looks great though! Two steps froward, one step back!