Film School: a video prospectus written, directed and filmed by your pupils

Laura Braun recently embarked on our 3-week school prospectus writing unit, Film School, with her KS2 class. Check out the epic video prospectus written and directed by her pupils and find out what Laura thought of the unit!

This blog post was originally published on staffrm

This half term I took on a teeny Y5/6 Class. We needed a project that wold take us through to the end of term and could fill all those ‘summer term 2’ gaps between performance rehearsals, beach cricket, forest schools days, National Trust working party days and whole school walks. Sound familiar?!

I used LitFilmFest El Dorado resources last year and knew I could rely on them again!

This term I used the 3-week Film School project – once again, it proved to be worth it. We are in the process of ‘reinvigorating’ school and what we needed was a promo video for our website. As soon as I introduced the idea to the kids, they were on board. They’d never done anything like this before and were also a bit apprehensive. The video stimulus that comes with the unit resources is spot on and explains the project with some ‘excellent’ acting from the Write Brothers. I didn’t have time to plan a whole half term’s work and the fact that all LitFilmFest units come with excellent plans and resources for each session made this a sinch to use. They are always on hand to answer any questions and give tech advice. Completely worth the cost of £1 a lesson!

For us, the project involved writing questions and ‘perfect answers’ for our interviewees to use, planning filming sequences and photo opportunities, writing narrative description and persuasive phrases, and recording voice overs. As a brilliant end to our unit, a friend from another school came with his drone to film a fly past and aerial video to end with. This kept the kids buzzing right to the end.

I would love to have been able to let the kids put it all together themselves, but time and tech was against us this time. I finished the final cut an hour after they left school last night, but it’s now live and on our website to view.

I’m already booking the units I will use next year – ‘War Story’ to link with our WW2 topic, ‘Character Profile’ to link with our work on Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell, and an adventure film – not quite sure which yet!

It’s always nerve wracking using planning from someone else – will it suit my class? Will it be good enough? will it fit my school’s methods of planning? Well, of course you’ll want to tweak it to fit your class – only you know what your kids will need, how it is best to deliver- but these units really will take hours off your planning time and produce brilliant written results from your class, with engagement throughout.

To get started on your own Film School video prospectus, visit litfilmfest.com.