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.

Yet Another Helpful Tutorial from MacLife

Build Your Own GarageBand Loops From Any Music File
"Loops are wonderful little things. With judicious use of these musical snippets, you can construct entire albums of material from tiny building blocks -- or just scatter a couple over your compositions for flavor. GarageBand comes with a pretty healthy assortment, but spend enough time in the Garage and you may find your songs starting to sound an awful lot like everyone else's.

You're in luck. In a few easy steps, you can create your own loops from nearly any music file you've got lying around."
Click Here to Read the Full Article

When You Have Some Time...

I know it's hard to make time as a teacher to do more than just plan and teach. But if you have a chance, sneak on over to this very helpful site. Here's what Techlearning has to say about it:
Storytelling 2.0 "It turns out a very busy person named Alan Levine created an online resource for a series of workshops that lists (at the time of this writing) 57 different Web 2.0 tools that can be used for digital storytelling. That in itself isn't unusual, of course, but what he did that was different was he took the time to retell the same story with each tool!

The site is at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools, and is wonderfully comprehensive. In addition to his own oft-retold story, almost all of the titles also include examples of stories told by others. He also has a shorter list at the end of tools that he's tried that weren't successful for one reason or another, so you can see what sites to avoid (at least for now). Be sure to budget a lot of time for exploring!"

Who's On Your Blacklist?

Submit a video of yourself, a relative, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, or anyone who has a story to tell about his or her personal experience of black life in America today.
Just like the subjects of the upcoming HBO documentary THE BLACK LIST: VOLUME ONE, the subjects of the winning videos will have their portraits taken by famed photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders in New York (transportation provided) and be interviewed by acclaimed journalist Elvis Mitchell. Select submissions may be showcased on various HBO platforms in 2009.

Download YouTube Videos

In the ongoing saga that is trying to get Youtube vids onto your desktop/into iMovie/into FCP...here's the newest update courtesy of Lifehacker. And I quote, from Tip #1 "If you want to stash a YouTube clip away for editing or watching without the net, you've definitely got options. Internet Explorer users might appreciate YouTube File Hack, which grabs FLV files for you. The Better YouTube Firefox extension, crafted by our own site editor, adds a simple 'Download this video' link to any YouTube page, and the All-In-One Video Bookmarklet is a nice cross-browser conversion tool. If you're away from your own setup, Vixy.net and Viddownloader are your go-to sites for downloading clips. As for watching FLV files, we like and use the cross-platform VLC player."
Click here for Lifehackers: Top 10 YouTube Hacks

Just One Way Folks are Bridging the Digital

Installfest is a volunteer run effor that took place at this year's LinuxWorld Conference

"The idea of Installfest is to take advantage of the low overhead of open-source tools and operating systems, such as the Linux-based Ubuntu, so that computers that would otherwise have been discarded can be put to use for educational institutions and other groups, including low-income individuals and non-profits. Organizers and volunteers installed open-source solutions, such as Firefox, Open Office, and Ubuntu, on recycled computers donated by the ACCRC, which will then be given out to participating schools." Read More Here