DVA 2017

The PAC was jam packed and the air crackled with anticipation, as the lights went down and the show began.  DVA 2017 commenced with special introductions and welcomes, two powerful musical performances, videos from across the school and from special guests, as well as three exhilarating dance performances by the 11th-grade circus groups. These were just a few highlights from the evening and then came the winning categories...

The quality of our student video work has skyrocketed in recent years. Each year we share these successes with the ABC community through our annual Digital Video Awards. DVA 2017-Film Makers of the Future,  was a huge success full of amazing student video submissions.

This year's DVA was unique in a great many ways, one being the opening up of the event to participants from other schools. This year it was our honour to host, the American School and Acton Academy, whose students took home quite a few awards in different categories.

G-Suite and DVA
We ran the entire event out of G-Suite including voting forms and folders of videos, which is the reason our student DVA videos are not on our Youtube Channel yet.  The beauty of this system is the low noise surroundings that the G-Suite folders provide and the privacy it affords our students and their work. It is also an internal system which not only allows us to apply certain restrictions to voters, embed video content,  and view the results on the go, as well as when we close the polls.

G-Suite played a huge part in the planning as well. Meetings were run through Docs, to-do lists were managed through Keep and posters produced through Slides. The entire program was a huge Google Doc and the internal structure of the event was contained within a series of shared folders in Drive.

Back to the Event
This year's theme was SciFi so we were able to reuse a few of our props from DVA 2016-Star Wars. Glow sticks and black lighting abounded. The photo booth was topped off by a portal containing a rotating psychedelic swirl and the stage was decked out in fluorescent curtains of dots, somewhat reminiscent of the late 1960s.

This year we brought our 12th grade Film student Victor back as part of the committee and as was the case last year,  he produced the entire main video production for the evening. We introduced a new award this year to honour Victor's Work throughout his ABC journey, the VHS Director's Award. VHS may bring to mind obsolete video cassettes, however, that is a sweet coincidence. The initials also belong to our top Film student, Victor.

It is difficult to describe the goings on of such a large event. Sometimes pictures speak more than words and this is one such case.

Here is a link to our DVA Flickr Album which truly helps one understand the mood of the evening and captures much of the action.

8th Grade Book Trailers

The 8th Grade created video book trailers on a book of their choices which they planned and produced in groups. This was a 6 week process involving 18 lessons of ICT. The 8th grade students are already quite skilled at video production, so this was an opportunity for them to branch out a bit and take on a video genre they were unfamiliar with. In preparing for the project, students learned about shots, angles and camera movement. They learned that trailers are generally fast paced,short in duration and involve a variety of shots and angles as well as scene changes. Through the project the 8th grade students were able to fine tune their video editing skills as well as try out a great many new techniques incorporating special effects and using the green screen. These trailers can be found on the LRC YouTube Channel as well as on this page. We hope you enjoy them!

Graphic Apps to Add to Your Toolkit!

I was wandering throught Twitter again today, after being informed I had a new follower-yes! Anyway this lead me to this newly resurrected blog on teaching with comics which of course got my attention immediately after all the work we have done with ToonDoo this year. Well I couldn't help myself I scanned the posts quickly and immediately came up with 3 new tools I just had to have!(Plus I left a comment about ToonDoo). The first of the tools is called Xtranormal and it allows one to create 3-d videos with a range of simple tools. It is a freebie and very user friendly which of course makes it even more special for those of us who teach. Another great tool is Block Posters, (once again it is free) which allows users to upload and slice images which are then dowloaded in PDF form for printing out as pieces of a larger poster. Finally, I have downloaded ComicLife for Mac from Plasq.com which is initailly free and allows users to create comics with photographs from their computers.

I have included a couple of examples below.

Xtranormal Link (having trouble with the embedding code)