Be Part of a New Adventure in Filmmaking

From the Apple Education Site, a new project called Set To Screen:
"Great movies are full of adventure, and Australia, the next film from Oscar-nominated director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet), is no exception. But making a movie is an even bigger adventure—an adventure in creativity—and with the Apple Set to Screen Series, you can be a part of it."

In a nutshell - Baz and Apple have created a web series about the making of his new film that you can subscribe to on iTunes. But they've also written a companion curriculum and are hosting a contest for High School and College Students.

"Five of the episodes arrive with something extra: a creative challenge for you. Each time one of these episodes is released, you’ll have three weeks to complete the challenge and post it to the Apple Student Gallery. If your project is one of the best (10 from high schoolers and 10 from college students), you’ll win an iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod touch, or a MacBook Pro. And if your work is chosen as the most creative of all, you’ll be going on yet another kind of adventure—a trip for two to Australia on Qantas Airways. Five challenges mean you’ve got five chances to win."

Looks like a wonderful resource. Says it will be up throughout October.

When the Teacher is a Great Student...

This just in from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): "In one of those improbable stories that sounds like a Hollywood script, a Burbank, CA elementary school teacher won an Emmy Award for his first attempt at filmmaking."

Meant to put this up long ago...

If you teach photography or your video class includes lighting, Strobist is one of the best resources available online. Here's their basic 101 video.



I've seen plenty of sites try to do the same for filmmaking 101 - and fail. They all seem to be too advanced or too juvenile. What do you think? If you have a resource to recommend, add it in the comments.

Strobist: Lighting 101

A couple of cool links for generating ideas

Writer's block? Cure writer's block with creative writing games - brainstorming widgets - poetry generator - character name generator

And here's one that allows you to create word trees of any text. Nice way to make art from something as dry as a political speech.