Reflection on Narrative Assignment / Dialogue Editing Exercise (Now Completed)

Starting with the Dialogue Editing Exercise, I feel confident that I'm becoming more proficient with Premiere.  I still have a long ways to go before I feel comfortable with it, but at least now I'm not trying to use it like it's iMovie.  With regard to the filming process (what we did on class last Tuesday), I'm becoming more and more aware of the necessary collective effort behind a movie, even if it's something as small scale as the 10 Things I Hate About You dialogue.  The resulting implications will change the way I approach a project like this.  Group work has been a struggle in my English classes since I began teaching, partly because of the solitary nature of reading and writing.  It seems like I've used group work arbitrarily at times, just to mix things up a bit, even if students could do the same task individually.  On the other hand, group work to create a movie is by no means arbitrary.  When we recorded this exercise in class, each of us had a role, and it would have been very difficult consolidate any two of those roles.  

Speaking of roles, I had the opportunity to inhabit the role of actor for the Narrative Assignment video.  Thanks to my charitable wife--also a non-actor--who was willing to play the part of the landlady, we shot this segment of the short story last week.  Is the resulting video a laughable train wreck?  Mostly, but I feel it was important to make it the way I did.  First, if I expect my students to make something performative/creative, I should show a willingness to do the same, even at the risk of making a total fool of myself.  Second, despite the video's weaknesses, I think it shows what I'm trying to accomplish with this assignment--transfer of knowledge/information from a shooting script to a video shoot.  What I shot was based entirely off the notes I wrote on my screenplay/shooting script.  That's what I'm trying to accomplish with my students, no matter the scale of this unit (I put a note at the end my lesson plans, explaining final assignment options--if I were going all out on this unit in a film class, I would have my students make a video like I did; because of the limited time in an English class, I would have my students turn their shooting script into a Photo Storyboard or even a drawn storyboard to save time).  

Things I will do differently next time?  As you can tell by listening to my Narrative Assignment video, I did not do a very good job with sound; I need to make sure to adjust the settings correctly to avoid the pervasive buzz.  Also, in editing this video, I've heard the dialogue so many times that I believe I could deliver those lines much better now than I did when we recorded, which means that I should have learned the dialogue better in the first place.  Additionally, my video would have benefitted from more extended takes.  At times I had the problem of not having enough footage after certain lines, which made L-cuts impossible when editing a couple parts together.