Table of contents for Spring 2014 (75) in Screen Education

Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays is an ambitious feature film that explores family relationships and one teenager’s coming of age in contemporary suburban Australia. This relatively low-budget production (approximately A$700,000) by Adelaide-based Closer Productions has created quite a stir on both the national and international stage. Following several successful screenings at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2013, the film had its North American premiere in January 2014 at the Sundance Film Festival, where Hyde won the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award. Shortly afterwards, a youth jury at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival awarded it the Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Generation 14plus category. The film opened in Australian cinemas on 1 May this year. 52 Tuesdays is an unconventional work on a number of levels. Perhaps most…

Making the morning coffee, we might see the steam rising from the cup, but we fail to see the actual waves of heat that radiate off the surface. Scribbling in pencil on the grocery list stuck to the fridge, we can see the graphite as it forms words and numbers, but we cannot see all the way down to the tiny vibrating carbon atoms that make up its form. The colour cards in the paint shop come in a dazzling variety of shades, which often differ by the most minute of degrees, but there are an unknown number of colours sitting outside humankind’s visible spectrum that other animals such as bees or birds can see with ease. National Geographic’s 2014 IMAX film Unseen World 3D (released internationally as Mysteries of…

As some primary teachers will be teaching Media Arts for the first time, the activities here have included literacy components that will be very familiar to you. I have provided a series of activities, some of which require very little technology beyond viewing websites and clips, and some that provide opportunities for students to create their own media in the form of book trailers. INTRODUCTION A new curriculum for The Arts, and particularly Media Arts, could not have come at better time. With teachers now being expected to include all modes of texts in their programs, particularly English and other Arts, Media Arts offers unique opportunities to encourage students to critically analyse media, as well as create a whole range of media and digital products that demonstrate their grasp of…

INTRODUCTION Educators are facing challenging times, but with such challenges comes opportunity for innovation, reassessment and change to traditional practices. Central to these challenges are the engagement and retention of students, and the need to reappraise our understanding of each student, their learning styles, their aspirations and the place education has for them in this changing world.1 We propose a need for educators to redefine or expand definitions of literacy to reflect the status of new-media literacies as integral to teaching today’s students, both to engage them and to provide essential life skills and workplace readiness. We argue that it is important to support students in developing the skills to be critical content producers with an understanding of the power of their communication and how to optimise this. In order…

LOGIC PRO X A$249.99 Mac OS X www.apple.com.au Logic Pro X is largely used by musicians and bands to record music, but it is increasingly being employed to score films. Whether you write your own music or just want to drag-and-drop ready-made music clips into place, Logic Pro X provides a smooth and efficient way to create a soundtrack for your film. For many years, Logic Pro was expensive and used only by professionals, but with the new release being sold for A$249.99, its popularity has grown. For many Mac users who had made music with GarageBand, Logic Pro X heralded the arrival of an application that enabled truly professional results – you could record your own music with just quality instruments and a good microphone. For filmmakers, the power…

If you teach a primary class, it’s likely that you are familiar with The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014). Playgrounds were long humming to the tune of ‘Everything Is Awesome’, and the word butt no doubt got more than the odd child or two in hot water. Lego kits were pulled from under beds, behind cupboards and out of boxes, and extracted from vacuum-cleaner bags as a resurgence of interest in those familiar blocks swept the country. The Lego Movie is decidedly one of the ‘must-see’ flicks of 2014 for kids, many of whom must have dragged their long-suffering parents in the direction of the Lego aisle to buy kits inspired by the movie. But in the face of rampant consumerism amounting to 100 minutes of product…

Ideas as such are a little overrated, really. It’s the work behind the idea that’s the important thing. – Nick Cave, 7.30 Report, ABC, 26 February 2013 Much has been written about the creative process, from practical ‘how-to’ screen-writing guides1 to psychological treatises about ‘flow’.2 There has also been much written about the importance of creativity for education and the economy.3 But how do teachers implement theories about creativity in the teaching of screenwriting? In particular, how do teachers take students beyond a great idea, as Nick Cave suggests above, and teach them the ‘work’ needed to make an idea into a story? This article will consider how teachers can harness creativity and the creative process to inspire students to take ideas, images and what-ifs based on the world they…

Ariel Shaw Twenty-seven-year-old Ariel Shaw completed the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Film and Television) in 2013. Having moved to Melbourne from Adelaide after high school, she worked for a time in the game-design industry before deciding to pursue her passion for film. After saving enough money, Shaw completed the VCA’s Film and TV Foundation Course. ‘The “Foundy”, as it’s affectionately termed […] was the best opportunity for me to get the chance to work with lecturers,’ she said. ‘By participating in that, it gave me the little bit of experience I needed to apply for the undergraduate course.’ Shaw said the Bachelor program was heavily practice-based, with workshops in many elements of film production including camera techniques, acting, rigging and lighting. We weren’t confined to a classroom that often, and…

Often, 1960 is cited as the year the modern horror film was born, seeing the release of Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It is the last of these that has carved a privileged place not just in the annals of horror history itself but also in the broader pop-cultural imagination. Evidence of its recent legacy exists in the current popular US television series Bates Motel and Sacha Gervasi’s 2012 biopic, Hitchcock, which focuses explicitly on the making of Psycho. Despite being one of Hitchcock’s most controversial movies, and one that was marked by a swathe of difficulties during its production, it garnered four Oscar nominations for the director and continues to frequently rank highly in lists of the greatest and most…

Alongside their major feature films, Pixar Animation Studios have created a significant selection of short films, which are diverse in both subject matter and animation styles. Despite their brevity, Pixar shorts have a huge emotional wallop. Their stories range from how a newly shorn lamb develops resilience, to what it feels like to fall in love for the first time. Their visual styles are equally expansive, ranging from traditional ways of depicting animals through to new forms of animated photorealism. BOUNCING BACK FROM ADVERSITY Boundin’ (Bud Luckey & Roger Gould, 2003) In Boundin’, a lamb discovers that life’s challenges can be met head-on if you learn how to be resilient. Our little fleecy hero, a newborn lamb living in the American West, spends his days happily dancing. His…

INTRODUCTION I n response to Claudio Miranda winning an Academy Award for his cinematography on Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012), irascible yet highly respected cinematographer Christopher Doyle fumed: ‘if it were me, I would’ve said fuck off […] If somebody manipulated my image that much, I wouldn’t even turn up.’1 Doyle’s fulmination reflects an ongoing and contentious debate regarding the role of directors of photography (DPs) in the digital age. Doyle continued: ‘Of course, they [the Academy] have no fucking idea what cinematography is. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.’ Many DPs see their authority and authorship declining as their work is increasingly transformed and digitally reauthored downstream. A second and parallel debate concerns the continuing decline of celluloid acquisition in favour of digital capture, with a consequent…

The information listed here relates to the courses on offer in 2014, and is intended as a guide only. Founded in 1992, the School of Film and Television (SFTV) at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) is the nation’s oldest university-affiliated film training institution. The school is one of only three full members of the prestigious International Association of Film and Television Schools (CILECT) in Australia, and boasts an impressive cast of alumni including Gillian Armstrong, David Michôd and Adam Elliot. Though the SFTV is formally part of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of VCA and MCM (Melbourne Conservatorium of Music), its programs are delivered at purpose-built facilities in the Southbank arts precinct. Students participating in SFTV courses are given access to state-of-the-art facilities and equipment, including different types…

The Poetry App https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/the -poetry-app/id501967950?mt=8  (iOS) https://play.google.com/store/apps/ details?id=com.mcsaatchimobile.the poetryapp (Android) Cost: free Attention, all English teachers! This interactive, visually and aurally stimulating app available on both iOS and Android devices provides a brilliant platform for teaching your students poetry. Developed by the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, The Poetry App contains over 100 poems from sixteen renowned poets including Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats and Sylvia Plath. TS Eliot, also featured in the app, believed that ‘Poetry should be read to us by skilled readers […] the feeling for syllable and rhythm penetrating far below the conscious level of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.’ The app embodies this philosophy as poems are accompanied by video and audio narrations from over thirty world-class actors and performers such as Bob Geldof, Charles…

Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 psychological thriller Black Swan probes the cinematic representation of female identity. The film, which self-reflexively engages with the Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake, is a thoroughly postmodern text; everything within the diegesis seemingly references something outside of it. The highly artificial, stylised duality that runs through the film is also present in the narrative, which engages a framework of explicit binaries in keeping with the ‘good’ white swan and the ‘bad’ black swan of the ballet. Black Swan is an astutely cineliterate film that reappropriates popular cinematic tropes, clichés and conventions pertaining to female identity on screen. The film’s female characters, who are ensconced within the tempestuous climate of a New York ballet company, are stereotypical Hollywood representations of women reliant on physical beauty for their success. Aspiring…