Monday, March 03, 2014
White House Student Film Festival, 2014
The White House is presenting the Student Film Festival of
sixteen films, each about three minutes or less. They are divided into eight
categories: “Young Visionaries” (6), “Future Innovators” (3), “World of
Tomorrow” (3), “Building Bridges” (4). The
basic link is here.
I was quite impressed with the fact that many students have
the opportunity to learn filmmaking in public high school. When I was substitute teaching, West Potomac
High School, in Fairfax County south of Alexandria, VA, had its own separate
building for media education. I remember
watching AP chemistry students making a short film to teach the concept of
radioactivity, called “Reltonium”, back in 2005, where the students acted as
clowns or as atoms. The kids then used Adone Premier (can be used on Windows). It seems as though in the White House festival, most editing had been done with Final Cut Pro, only on the Mac.
I have watched eight of the films.
In the first section:
“Stay Curious: Technology in the Classroom”, by Kayla Briet,
was shot in “2.35:1” and offered in high definition. Briet comments that technology affects how we
see people, and she talked about poverty, corruption and struggle.
“Through the Lens of a Tiger”, Jason Perry shows technology
education at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington DC, a school that often
appears on “It’s Academic” in the DC area on Channel 4.
“Teleportation Investigation of 2014,” by the Extrazzlers,
doesn’t quite deliver the idea of going to another universe through a black
hole, but it does look at the future of progress,
“Technology, Documentary, My Dad an Me”, by Shelly Ortiz”. A
high school student in Los Angeles enlists her dad into becoming “executive
producer” of her film.
In the second section:
“PIP”, the lead character in Charles Dickens’s “Great
Expectations” and also on Rod Sterling’s Twilight Zone, is high schooler
Richard White, who aiks high to become an astronaut, at least in front of his
class. He learns sewing from the
computer, and plays chess also, and apparently misses one of Grandmaster Larry
Kaufman’s Monte Carlo recommendations as the computer checkmates him in a
bizarre middle game. (Maybe the game was
a Sicilian Sveshnikov. You can’t afford to stumble on tactics.) This was the liveliest film that I watched.
In the third section:
“Tomorrow’s Classroom”, by Alexander Emerson, makes the
point that “my community is worldwide but my education is localized.”
In the fourth section:
“Hello from Malaysia” introduces a girl from that country,
communicating first by Skype. We see
scenes from the country only in the end credits.
“A Day in the Life of Kyle” presents a student at the David
Posnack Jewish Day School. The catch is
that Kyle attends school via robot while he undergoes chemotherapy in a
Philadelphia children’s hospital.
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