Blog & News
The School Movie Challenge
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
They always say ‘never work with children or animals’. Well why not? Our recent forays with our School Movie Challenge show the degree of children and young people’s creativity and insight- and how it can even be used by their own school’s marketing department.
Working with a growing number of schools, we’ve been busily teaching pupils and teachers the ropes of film making- from storyboarding right through to filming and editing- and then supporting them to produce their schools’ own promotional videos.
Charlie, our MD, says:
“More and more schools are recognising the power of video and social media. The point of the School Movie Challenge is not to end up with a glossy corporate video, but one where the schools’ belief in their pupils’ creativity helps to show the school as it really is”.
Norwich High School’s Challenge
Our most recent school to have taken up the School Movie Challenge is Norwich High School for Girls. More than 80 pupils took part working in teams to produce films on the themes of teamwork, creativity, and friendship.
In a Dragon’s Den style pitch, pupils put forward their ideas using storyboards, after which the best were chosen for production.
Pupil’s liked one of their peers’ storyboard drawings so much, that she produced animations for the final video on friendship.
Another shot involved 200 pupils on the school playing-field creating a ‘human crest’ of the school’s logo, filmed by us from a 50ft crane. This became the final shot for the ‘teamwork’ video above.
You can read more about how the pupils designed their films from our Creative Director Frank, by clicking here.
Schools Tap-In to Video and Social Media
Schools are catching on to the power of video and social media, and many hope that their pupils will help spread the school’s videos through their own use of social media platforms.
Adrian Walker, Deputy Head of Norwich High School for Girls, says:
“Children can see what it would be like to be a pupil at the school. We will be accompanying the launch of the video with Twitter messages to increase hits to our website.”
Pupil Film Producers Grow
Pupils at Halesworth Middle School were the first to test out our School Movie Challenge, followed by Gresham’s Senior, Prep and Pre-Prep Schools. Gresham’s video had 5,000 downloads in its first 10 days, compared to 200 for its previous film. You can watch a video of our time with Greshams here.
Wymondham High School diploma students have also been working with us to build their skills, and we have been providing training to staff and students at Wymondham College to produce their own video content- which you can watch on their website.
What next?
More School Movies we hope! We’re currently in talks with several other schools, so we hope to keep the fun going (we’re rather enjoying ourselves).
We’re also busily developing video projects with pupils of special and complex needs schools, who we believe can excel at such creative projects.
If you’d like to know more about our School Movie Challenge, or any other work with schools and colleges, we’d love to hear from you.
We also run a two-day course, Creating Content for the Web, for schools, businesses and organisations. The course offers tricks of the trade to create video content, and also supports participants to create their own 60 second video.
You can catch us on 0845 621 11 33 or email info@eyeforbusiness.co.uk
