A presentation of AIT.
Hi, I'm Cassie, and this is my journal. I write in
it almost every day. Sometimes I write about my family,
my mom, my grandpa and my big sister Mia. She's in
college. We email each other a lot. Sometimes I write
about my friends and all the adventures we have at school, the neighborhood,
and at Club ride. Club ride is one of my favorite activities.
There are a bunch of kids in the club plus Miss Farris, the teacher.
She comes up with cool projects for us to do. We write stories,
plays, poems, letters, and lots of other stuff.
Wanna know more? Go take a look inside my journal book. Come with
me.
Hey Mia, check this out. My friends and I made a movie.
We did everything. We wrote the story, we did the acting,
and we taped our movie using Grandpa's video camera. It all started when Miss
Farris got a letter about a video contest for kids.
Hey guys, I have got some exciting news. The Community
Arts Center is sponsoring a young people's video
contest. To enter, you must make a movie 5 minutes or
less using a home video camera and get this
the grand prize is a trip to Los Angeles to see a
live movie studio. Cool, a
movie studio. Ms. Spears wanted to make the contest our
next writing project. All the kids were really excited to
get us started. Miss Fierce showed us 3 short movies. They were all made
by kids that Miss Sears had taught in the past. Miss Fierce
also showed us the screenplays that went with the.
A screenplay is the text from which a movie
is made. It describes the pictures we see and the
words we hear. I now want you to take a look at
these screenplays and see how very different they are.
And looking for this project, Miss Beerce asked us to work in groups of 3
or 4. I was in a group with Daniel, Yan, and
Orlando. Miss Beer said it was very important to remember our rules
about group work. Speak softly so you don't disturb the other
groups. Only one person speaks at a time in each group.
Everyone listens. Respect everyone's opinion even
if you don't agree with it. And everyone keeps notes and everyone
shares the work since everyone is in their group, I tell you
what, why don't we begin to brainstorm on ideas for
our screenplays, all right? And I think it might be a good idea if
you'll pass those out for me to think about what kind of movie that
you'd like to make maybe action, comedy or
romance. Come on guys,
come on.
How about we make a Kung Fu movie about a kid who has to wipe on an
alien? We could have tons of really cool special effects. Well, I don't
know. None of us can do Kung Fu. Maybe we can do a comedy,
something goofy like the Three Stooges. I have an
idea about a mystery story like Sherlock Holmes or Nancy
Drew. You guys will never make a movie if we just sit around
arguing over what it's gonna be about. Anyways, we're not supposed
to decide on anything yet. We're supposed to be brainstorming lots
of ideas. Orlando is right at this
point you should be letting your imaginations go and generating lots and lots
of ideas. Remember the brainstorming rules? Put all
of your ideas down. Whether they are good or
bad, I mean, no idea is better or worse at this point. Just
put everybody's ideas down and then after that you can start
evaluating which ideas are really good. Talking with Miss
Farris helped us get back on track. We decided to combine some of the ideas we had
brainstormed and make our movie a funny kung fu mystery. Our next
assignment was to write an outline for our story and bring it to the next Clubright
meeting. A few days later, I met my group at the library.
Oh dude, hey guys, I found a book about Kung Fu. Oh, let me see.
I'm going over to the shelf with the mysteries. I'll be going to the
computer. I'll be looking up some stuff about the Three Stooges.
After doing a little research, we got some good story ideas for our movie.
When we got together again, we talked about what to put in the story. The
star could be a goofy detective. He could be klutzy and run the walls and
stuff, and we could have funny looking aliens that go around kidnapping people's
pets. But what about the kung fu? We could
have intergalactic kung fu fighters from outer space
who come to Earth to solve intergalactic crimes. What
if we had a girl detective like Nancy Drew? She could have her own
detective agency and solve mysteries. She could also do kung fu and
fight aliens. Is there anything you guys can agree
on? Remember what Ms. Fair said about working together.
Well, now, now looks like you all are hard at work, but I'm gonna have to ask you to hold
your volume down just a little bit, right? OK, that's all right.
Now it looks like you're having a little trouble working as a group too. I got a
suggestion for you. Try jigsawing. Jigsaw,
like a puzzle. Yeah, that's exactly right. Now, now you're working
on this movie project with Ms. Ferris, right? Lots of parts of
that job. I mean you gotta have, we gotta have settings, locations,
gotta have characters, dialogue, right? You gotta have scenes and
action to tell your story. So what you do is you, you divide your task
into into several parts. You have each person
responsible for a different part. See, jigsawing.
We followed Mister Moriarty's suggestion and tried splitting up the
work. Yan and I worked on the characters and the setting. Daniel
and Orlando were responsible for the scenes and actions. After we finished
our individual parts, we put our work together. In the end, we
had an outline of our story. To help us with the video part of
this project, the Spears invited Molly Secors to Club Wright.
Molly was a writer and filmmaker. She gave us some tips on writing and
shooting a movie, and the script is the central tool that
you're going to use. The script is actually the starting point for the film.
Only thing that should be in that script is something that you can
portray visually, OK? You want to be able to see everything
you write into a script. So if you're writing someone's thoughts,
someone's feelings, you gotta be able to show it visually, right? OK, so we're gonna remember
that the other thing is we don't wanna put anything in there
that's not necessary just because you come up with a funny bits. If it
doesn't have anything to do with the movie, take it out after
she helped us with our stories, Molly showed us how to operate a video
camera. She told us to make sure there was enough light so you can see
what's going on in the movie. Also she said to pay attention to
the audio and make sure we were recording the sounds. It would be awful
if you finished the movie and then you couldn't make out what anyone was
saying. That weekend we got together at my house to work on our first drive.
We wanted our movie to be really good, so we worked hard on our rough
draft. We remembered the things Miss Ferris had said.
Make sure your story has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Don't
lose focus. Concentrate on the key events or actions in
the story. When you have a clear story, go back and add
details. Make sure you have a good ending that resolves any
conflict. Man, we've been
working for hours. Yeah, writing is hard work. I'm
tired. Don't get tired yet now that we have a story. Let's
make it into a script, you know, like the one Molly showed us. Yeah, let's
make it like a real screenplay with the people's names on the left and the lines on the
right. So we had to do more work, but it was worth it.
When we were done, our story looked like a real movie script. It wasn't
finished. We still had to revise it, but we were
almost ready to shoot our movie. We decided to celebrate by spending the rest
of the day with popcorn and a bunch of our favorite movies. At the
next Clubri meeting, the spirits helped us revise our rough drives.
They bring her back. You guys, you have a really strong story,
but um the ending is weak and it's not a good idea
to resolve conflict with violence. Uh I am
certain that you can come up with a more creative fun ending than
that so we listened to Miss Farris and got busy revising our
screenplay. When we got to the ending, we had writer's block.
We thought and thought but couldn't think of a good ending. We decided to
just leave it by for now and come up with something later.
The next day I went out to Dragon Park to meet the kids in the group.
We were finally going to start shooting our movie. Hey guys, what are you doing?
We're playing movie stars. I'm signing autographs. They might be worse
off than one of these days. What is Daniel doing?
Oh, he's just accepting his Best Actor award. I'd like to say
thank you to. Entire world and.
Mostly Cassie, Orlando, and you fawn
with without whom none of this should be possible. Oh
please, dream on. Can we get serious and figure out who's gonna
play which part? This took a little while. Everyone wanted to be the
hero except for Orlando, who just wanted to get on with the
movie, but we found a fair way to choose. We played rock paper
scissors, rock paper scissors. Yay, I'm the
detective. Lights,
camera, action. I found another clue about the
aliens. It's a jar of green goop.
What does it mean? Where are the evil creatures hiding?
What's your mission? What do you want with Earth? It's none of your
business. I am
the leader. I command you to let them go.
Well, that's it. That's the end of the script and we still don't have an ending. I have
an idea, OK. Our detective is chasing the
aliens because she thinks they're bad.
What if the aliens are really good? Uh, maybe they're on a
mission to Earth. To find another alien who got
stuck here a long time ago and then they're gonna bring him home.
And Detective Wong could be that alien even though she doesn't even
know it. I like it. I like it. Let's write the dialogue right down and
shoot it. So we finally had an ending to our movie,
and it was a good ending too. It wasn't violent and it showed a good
lesson. At the end of our movie, Detective Juan finds out that she's an
alien. Father, my daughter.
And decides to go back to her home world with the other alien.
When Club Wright met again, Molly was there. She had come to help
us edit the movies that we'd made. OK, one of the things you're gonna do
is you're gonna go through and you're gonna look at all your different shots, right? You pick the shot
you like, you mark it, OK, make sure that you're
ready and then you decide. Where you're gonna go next
now real important thing is we gotta make sure that it matches up, right?
What's that called? Continuity. OK, it took us almost a
whole week to edit our story. We stayed after school every day to work
on our movie. We didn't mind though. We were having fun
and we really wanted to win the contest.
When we were finished with our movies, we gave them to Miss Ferris,
and she sent them off to the video contest. She told us that when she
found out the results, we would have a special screening at Club Wright, and she
would announce the winner. A couple of weeks later, Miss Fears said it was
time for the Club Wright movie screening. Unfortunately, the first
prize did not go to any of the Club Wright kids.
However, two club right groups
did receive an honorable mention, including
Cassie's group and Igor's group.
Good work. And really guys you should all be
commended for the hard work you did and the very creative interesting
movies you made. I don't doubt that you know one of
you may easily become a Spike Lee or a Steven
Spielberg someday. Yeah, so now let's watch some movies,
OK? The movie screening was a blast. I don't
know why, but it was really funny to see your friends in the movie.
Everyone laughed and laughed. The funniest of all was watching our movie.
I remembered all the goofy things that happened while we were making the movie,
and I couldn't stop laughing. I looked around at my group and I was