Lights, Camera…Creativity! PT Hosts 8th Annual Film Fest
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After brainstorming, filming, and editing, students premiered their films during a special screening in the gym. Complete with a movie poster contest and awards, the festival celebrated the joy of learning by doing.
The annual film festival gives kids a chance to explore hands-on, real world media arts skills in the classroom. Students across every grade level spend six weeks exploring creative skills like photography, animation, scriptwriting, puppetry, sound editing and visual storytelling. Younger classes use a performance component in their films, singing songs to showcase puppets and paper crafts while older students experiment with stop motion animation and live-action filmmaking.
This year, our fifth graders took things to a new level by pitching the idea of creating a film together as one big production team. Some students stepped into acting roles while others edited weekly footage in Canva. The excitement and ownership around having access to technology in this way unlocked a lot of creativity for these older students, who are already thinking about future videos.
Every class closely follows a production calendar, which highlights the benchmarks they need to meet each week to finish their films. This helps our students work toward long-term goal setting and resource management.
The project may look messy from the outside (so many cardboard boxes!) but inside that creative energy, students are discovering new talents. Our art teacher summed it up well, “Learning often coexists with chaos, and the challenges that arise are actually what makes it so special,” she said.
Hope in action tends to look like joy, and there is a lot of joy in discovering what makes a film work! – Sarah Caputo, Art & Multimedia Coordinator
That joy could be felt throughout the festival. From sets and stop-motion props scattered across the art room to laughter echoing through the gym during the show. Behind every film was a student who learned how to bring a new idea to life from beginning to end.
