S2F2

David Gran and Mikey McKillip open S2F2

After months of planning, the Shanghai Student Film Festival proved to be one of the most rewarding experiences of this teacher’s career.

Why?

The number of students from international schools across Shanghai and across the world that were able to participate and be a part of this event were inspiring to me. Elementary students, middle school, high school… all were represented and each and every one of them brought something unique to the festival. From the gregarious student to the shy student, many students were able to explore learning 21st century style by telling stories using film as the medium. As Scott McCloud mentioned in his opening S2F2 speech, films are still a relatively new medium and the potential to discover new things using film is great indeed.

Sky McCloud joins Shanghai students in the workshops

At my school, we had a quarter long elective class every other day to expose kids more in depth to art of film making. Kids made short films in this class, but what I find surprising (and encouraging) is that students submitted films that were either made on their own time OR that were created within the classroom to share their learning. Is this not

Shanghai students celebrate their success

fantastic?? As educators, this is what we want for our students… embedded technology and authentic uses of technology. Just another reason every school school have a tech integrationist….

If you are thinking of starting a film festival in your neck of the woods, I want to share with you something that made our event this year even more special. Students who submitted films from all over Shanghai were invited to our school for the day so that they could attend a mini-conference just for them. They signed up using a google form ahead of time which helped us organize the event. Over 100 students attended interactive workshop sessions about:

animation
green screening
acting in filM
using Foley for sound

If you have questions about staring a film festival in your area, please contact us as we’re more than willing to help out. Tim Bray has the Phoenix Film Festival coming up at the end of April as well – we’re so excited to see film festivals growing in the region!

Students receive a free S2F2 t-shirt thanks to our sponsors

I’ve loved working with David Gran, Mikey McKillip, Jonathan Chambers and all of the others on the board for this event – remarkable educators. We’ll be presenting at the Apple Education Leadership Summit in Hong Kong (April 24-26) and we hope to see you there!

Please start a student film festival in your area…. start small and then watch it grow!

Scott McCloud – A Master Storyteller…

We have been VERY busy planning the Shanghai Student Film Festival over the past several months. This has turned out to be such an amazing experience for so many of our middle school studentsin my school. This year, more than ever, students are creating content and displaying their knowledge using multimedia software on our Macs. The actual S2F2 event is tomorrow (more on that later) where we’ll have about 400 students from around Shanghai gather in one place to celebrate our films. What is special about S2F2 this year though is that ALL students in our schools have been able to be a part of S2F2 activities.

This week, we have been fortunate to have Mr. Scott McCloud visit our campuses as part of the S2F2 lead up. Mr. McCloud works a great deal with digital comics and he is an incredible storyteller. Students listened to him give a student oriented TED Talk for a full hour and he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. He is a master storyteller! The way he demonstrates the use of an infinite canvas to share stories speaks to me. He even wrote a recent blog post about Prezi – of course, I love that after my first prezi last month!

After the TED Talk, Mr. McCloud worked with all of our 6th graders in their art classes. The 6th grade students are staring a comic unit and they were able to learn from the best during class! Thank you so much to Mr. McCloud for visiting our campus. He’s a professional and better yet, he’s a genuinely nice man!!