Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement

Check out this fantastic video explaining what makes master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's films so special!

Amazing split-screen music video

Check out director Alex Courtès new music video for the French duo Cassius. The video isn't entirely school appropriate but the concept is super cool.


Cassius ft. Cat Power Pharell Williams | Go Up from DIVISION on Vimeo.

Stop Motion & Time Lapse Movies

One of my favorite free apps that I've found during my time as a teacher is iMotion. This app allows you easily create stop motion videos with manual capture and automatic capture functions. There are lots of videos already online that can help you with some of the basic features of the app, however I really think it's worth downloading and playing around with yourself to really get a feel for it!

During my time teaching I've used in creating stop-motion projects and also as a tool for documenting their process. Time-lapse videos and stop-motion are things I found all students knew of, but didn't quite understand the specifics behind how it all worked. iMotion was a fantastic way to talk about things like how animation works, how things can be slowed down or sped up and frame rates.

Like most of my favorite apps, one of the best features about is it's free so it's accessible to anyone with an apple device!

Here are two examples with a warmup project I did kicking off the year with 8th graders. For this, they worked in a group collaboration creating a symmetrical design which they would fill with zentangles and paint the negative space with gradations. To get them used to the digital integration components of the class they were to collaborate using iMotion app and Google Drive in putting together a stop-motion (or time-lapse) movie showing their process





This was a project I did my first year were students storyboarded their own stop motion movies and then took the finished videos and created music that synced up to them in their music class. Unfortunately, the files I had backed up got lost in a computer getting fried before I backed up regularly to google drive (lesson learned). Lucky for me, at least I had this video saved, even if it is without the sound!



If you try out iMotion for yourself and have any questions about it feel free to comment and I'll help you out anyway that I can!

Video Screen Recording

So before I started this blog I didn't know how to do something that you see on youtube all the time - a video recording of what's happening on your computer screen. I found out how to do it, and if you have a Mac it's actually super simple!

Step 1 - Open Quicktime Player
Step 2 - In the top left corner go to file -> New Screen recording

Step 3 - You'll get a pop-up for a box with a red record button icon in the middle. If you want to make it so that you can record your voice also, click down on the arrow next to the record button. If you have your own microphone set-up you can use that, or you can just use your mac's internal microphone like me!

Step 4 - After you hit record you have two options. You can either A) click and drag on the screen for the section you want to record (it can be adjusted before you start the recording), or B) just click anywhere on your screen and it will begin to record your full screen.

Step 5 - This part held me up for a little bit- after you start recording, it's not so obvious how to stop. Eventually I found a stop button in the top right corner of my screen that hadn't been there before!

Step 6 - After you stop your recording, a quicktime movie player of your new recording will pop-up. Be careful though, it doesn't mean it is automatically saved! To save the video you can click File -> Save and then enter in the details for your save box. 

Optionally, you can select File -> Export ->    .. and you will see some extra options for saving at different qualities and sizes.

And it's as easy as that! No need to get any new apps or installations, the capability is there for you already if you have a apple computer.

As a teacher, this is a great resource for making videos to give walkthroughs for students, for making videos in a flipped classroom setting, or it can even be used to record a small section of a video to have it saved for your lessons and presentations!

Hope this was as helpful for you as it was for me!
-Bill from Blogspot