Anson Primary School launched its film club in 2009 with a screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The club, run by assistant headteacher Simon Pile, started with 16 children – seven years on, it has more than 100 regulars and Pile has been named teacher of the year at the Into Film awards. We caught up with him to talk about the success of the project.
Our school is in an area of Brent in north-west London that is hard-pressed and some of the children don’t get to go to the cinema or see other parts of the capital. There are 41 different languages in the school, 30% of students are from low-income backgrounds and more than 25% have special educational needs or disabilities.
Film club is not just about watching the film, it’s about interrogating it and being able to sit with your friends and communicate why you did or didn’t like something. It is about giving children that social opportunity to be together and watch a film all the way through, from start to finish, without being called for dinner or being interrupted by somebody wanting to watch something else.
Sometimes you might think the children aren’t really watching or following the story, but then they amaze you with the most incredible answers. When we watched Rear Window and Grace Kelly escapes from the apartment, the hall erupted into spontaneous applause. In the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy leaves Kansas and the film turns to colour, we suddenly got silence. We also debated which teacher was most like Augustus Gloop.
After watching a film, we use a big inflatable dice to generate questions and get children moving. We always have six questions designed to interrogate that film, based on the three Ss and the three Cs: story, setting and sound, and colour, character and camera.
We now have a spin-off filmmakers club which uses a lot of the techniques and story ideas the children have seen on screen. One girl made a film about the time she got a paper cut. She created a lovely cut-out animation with some live-action shots of her finger. It was less than a minute long but she did it all herself; the storyboarding, the cutting out, filming and editing.
We have been using film as a way to bridge the curriculum because it can be incredibly powerful, whether it is short clips or whole films. It enables children to experience stories and empathise with characters.
Green screening can transport children to different parts of the world, which can be very powerful in a non-fiction context. Year 2 did a complete animation of the great fire of London, they worked on it for a number of weeks and set the city on fire with tissue paper. Year 5 used augmented reality to document the different parts of London, based on their research.
We have a film festival every year to showcase the work of the whole school, including the teachers. This year reception made talking heads, year 1 created an animation with Smarties and year 2 made a film based on the work of Georges Méliès.
My advice to other schools interested in creating films would be to start simple and take out the editing process. A one-minute film that points a camera at one thing and shoots is perfect.
I also recommend using the 5,4,3,2,1 technique; five shots in the film, about four people in the group, three props, no more than two minutes, looking at one theme. The beauty is that there is no editing – just pause the camera, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and then film the next scene.
The way we use film has become quite sophisticated but we started by projecting on to an extra large bedsheet from Argos. It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive.
