Teaching Moving Image Arts

Prioritising your Skills

Don’t set out to learn everything right away. This is a recipe for stress. Instead break up your learning needs over time. This table represents a realistic series of goals.

Target time

Learning area

Before September

Elements of Film Language:
Aim to acquire a working knowledge of what these terms mean:

  • Genre
  • Narrative
  • Narration
  • Mise-en-Scene (Setting & Props, Costume, Hair & Make-up, Movement, Positioning & Performance)
  • Lighting & Cinematography
  • Camera Framing
  • Camera Movement)
  • Editing
  • Sound
  • Characters & Performances

Rudimentary Film-making:

To know the process of making a shot and be familiar with storyboarding, referring to a script and shooting list.

By October

Basic Video editing on an entry level package (iMovie or Pinnacle). Make sure you know how to:

  • Capture Footage
  • Edit the length of a clip
  • Apply a transition
  • Adjust the speed of a clip
  • Apply a filter
  • Bring audio from a CD into the timeline
  • Drop colours and still pictures into the timeline
  • Apply titles – over the clip and over a colour
  • Output to DV tape
  • Zoom in and out of the timeline
  • Overlay one clip over another
  • Extract a still from your clip and add it to the timeline

By Christmas

 

Get to grips with at least a few of the creative film-making exercises from that section of this site but all the time, be thinking about how you can adapt the exercise to your own individual circumstances.

Begin making inroads into stop-motion animation.