On Urbana’s last school out day (March 6th), Community Ambassador at UNCC, Hailley, led two workshops that let elementary students begin to think more deeply about how films are made and stories are told.
We first worked with K-2 students. We watched a short film and talked about the story line. This was a good opportunity to discuss how a story is divided into a beginning, middle, and end and what the climax of a story is. Our film was Oktapodi, a 2009 Pixar Animated Short Film.
After some discussion, we moved into how the film was made, focusing on three key elements: sound/soundtrack/music, pacing, and camera angle. After we talked about these elements, we watched the film again, focusing more on these elements of storytelling.
The second film we watched with K-2 was another Pixar animated short film called Presto.
The next group we worked with was our 3-5th graders. The workshop ran similar to K-2, but instead we watched Egyptian Pyramids and One Man Band. Both of these were a little longer films and had some more complicated storytelling elements. While watching One Man Band, we split the groups up and each group was assigned two different elements to discuss in small groups. We had the groups write up their observations on the whiteboard before our final discussion. We snapped one photo before it was time for lunch!
I’ve created Critical Consumers of Film Program PDF for others to duplicate this workshop. I hope you find it useful.
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