2016 Manaiakalani Film Festival

Have you ever had anybody pronounce your name incorrectly? Ever corrected them and had them not really care about making an effort to say it right?

Making an effort to pronounce words that we're not used to is SO important. It can be the difference between someone feeling worthless or valued, the difference between a language lost or a language revitalised!

Check out the strategies some of us in Hub 5 have used to make te reo Māori more accessible to everybody!

Editing etiquette

Today we were lucky enough to have the WHOLE day to edit our Manaiakalani Film festival entries. Despite my last post of feeling quite unorganised, I feel like the entirety of this year's Fridays, up until now, have scaffolded us really well for this day! The iMovie little tips and tricks come in handy when splitting and merging clips and all of the filming has been done with the camera in a landscape position rather than a portrait one! Yay.

Although we had the whole day, I spent most of the day editing about a 5 second piece in my film because I didn't have one clean shot of a really significant scene of dialogue between two characters - this meant that instead of one clean shot, I had to cut to one learner's face, then to the other and then back to the original, all the while ensuring the voice over matched the image - what a mission! Had I been as organised as my last post fantasized, I would not have had this problem! Just as well we had the time to edit today!

It was brilliant to be able to play the small portion of my film that was ready to my colleagues to receive feedback about what could be done differently, Dorothy forewarned us that when it is our project with our lovely learners within the scenes it makes it hard to edit objectively! It also really helped to have the big loud speakers when playing back our film, as it made it possible to hear any discrepancies in the audio.

A couple of reflection points:

• As I was editing today I wished that I had taken more shots at different/interesting angles
• I think this year I addressed an issue that I noticed was quite prevalent within our school community. Next time, I would like more learner voice in the say of the topic of the movie. 
• I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge how easy it is to edit on iMovie. I can only wince in pain as imagine what people 'back in the day' would have to go through to edit films!

Getting wise with Garageband

Today the MDTA cohort had Rob Wiseman of Point England School come and spend the day. Rob came into the education sector with 6 years of teaching music behind him so we were fortunate to have him as our Garageband guru for the day!

The practical tips I have compiled above have been done so with movie making in mind, with the fast approaching Manaiakalani Film Festival on the horizon. The most important lesson from the day was that you don't have to be musically inclined to create something that sounds good on Garageband or to have high quality voiceovers - as Rob made sure to point out, Apple has created Garageband so that it is user-friendly for the inexperienced, yet has the ability to allow experts to create complex pieces. I am eager to get some filming done so I can have some serious sandpit time with these new skills!