[Miscellany]

Yesterday during lunchtime someone in the office accidentally pressed the "inside evacuation" bell instead of the end of lunch bell. I was in the art room with a whole bunch of children doing art club and can I just say when I heard that alarm bell I almost pissed my pants in fear. The preps all looked at me asking what to do and I looked at them with a lovely vacant expression on my face fumbling with my answer. Just what *do* we do again? We have done numerous drills where the kids evacuate and where the kids are playing in the playground and then have to come inside. I'm right on top of that. But we've never done one where the kids are all over the place (ie: as is usual for kids) like the artroom and library etc and have to get back to their teacher. Why haven't we done this before? In any case it's nice to know that if we're ever invaded by a gun toting maniac and the bell goes off I'll probably piss my pants and suck my thumb like the other kids.

Actually, I was pretty impressed with how the preps behaved. Last year when we did our fire drill my grade started rolling around on the floor, blocking their ears and/or trying to copy the annoyingly high pitched fire drill with their own annoyingly high pitched voices. Preps this year are way cooler than last year.

Today we had our first real training session for the movie project. It was a fun day filled with hands on activities about storyboarding and other film making tips. The kids were angels during the whole thing and it's nice to get to know them as people rather than as just part of the class.

The little section on montage and Eisenstein gave me a flashback to uni days swealtering in a non air-conditioned crowded seminar room on the 2nd floor "H Building" while watching juxtaposing images by Eisenstein and thinking "what the fuck?". Good times. It's good that I'm a movie whore and did a bit on storyboarding and other film stuff (though no actual filming) in uni because otherwise I would be even more lost than what I am now.

This project is entirely child run from idea, writing to filming and editing, so the idea they came up with is one I'm really going to have to fine tune - though I'm not sure how.

Umbrella theme - Don't judge a book by it's cover.
genre - Spy film parody (comedy)
general idea: inept school nerd overcomes dorkiness, solves mystery, wins the respect of his peers, and saves the day. It's okay to be a dork.

Yeah it's pretty crap but they are so, so excited by it. So we need a really top notch mystery and/or script change still within genre but more meaty to make this work. Any ideas?

Kids totally poopooed - claymation idea, anything sad, no documentary etc. Ideas from last year were: A soccer ball that rolls away and everyone chases it, a student/teacher swap day, a skater who wins his tournament as a tribute to his sister fighiting cancer, a mockumentary on school bullies etc etc.

Our original idea was a melodrama, thank god they steered away from that one.

We didn't get to hear of any other ideas that any other schools had except our storyboarder heard one team discussing their script and mentioning aliens. uh oh.

posted by M at 4:15 pm 8 comments