Ffilmschool

Ffilmschool (2006-7) was a year-long series of short film-making projects, mostly in schools with children aged around 10-12 (Years 6 and 7), principally funded by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Wales. The project was also supported by Apple and Canon.

Most of the projects lasted around a week. With each project, we started by giving the chidren an overview of the basics of film language, and gave them some simple practice filming and editing activities to build their skills.

Here are two poem films by children from Pontrhydyfen Primary School, in the Afan Valley Communities First area in South Wales. (The Afan Valley activities were also supported by Neath Port Talbot CBC.)

Each group in the class chose a place in their local area to do a 'personification' poem (it was the place which was speaking, as if it was a person). They recorded the poems into iMacs (using iMovie HD) and then went out to film images to explain the poems, editing them to match the soundtrack.

Castle



Bodies



In the Welsh language project below – from Ysgol Saron, Carmarthenshire – the class adapted the legend of how the local lake of Llyn Llech Owain was formed. (A knight returning from the wars accidentally left the top off the spring; when he realised what he had done he galloped around the lake three times to stop the water flowing; he went off to sleep in a cave and will awaken again if Wales is in danger.)

We divided the story up into sections, and each group scripted, storyboarded, filmed and edited one section. Here's the completed film telling the whole story.

Llyn Llech Owain