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CAS Blog
Luciana Pun
70 years of Markham
Markham College, my school, was inaugurated 70 years ago in 1946 in Lima, Peru. Our school has gone a long way since its start and the directors in the school wanted to commemorate our school's history. This is why, on Thursday the 29th of September, a celebration took place all day. All kinds of people were involved to make this an amazing day, and I was in charge of the cinematography for the video that was going to be made to show the celebration. For this I got 2 hours of SERVICE and CREATIVITY.
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The learning outcomes of this activity will be:
LO1: Identify own strenghts and develop areas for growth
LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
This day was very important for our school and as a consequence there were various activities taking place on Thursday. For the students, the funniest part of the whole celebration was that we were able to come with no-uniform to school.
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The fun part of the no-uniform was that each year group was asked to dress as an specific year. P6 students had to go dressed as teachers, S1 as the 30's, S2 as the 40's, S3 as the 50's, S4 as the 60's, 5B/N as the 70's and 6B as the 80's. Also the teachers were asked to dress up as the students.
The main activities took place during lunch and I was asked to film the whole show. Obviously it was super important to film everything as this was a once in a lifetime event. Therefore, I decided to use 3 cameras in total. One still camera located far away to film the whole event, one camera to take pictures and another camera, which would be hand held to do close-up shots.
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Before the main event took place, I had to go to the Film room and get the materials that were going to be used. Additionally to the three cameras, I had to get a tripod, a camera stabilizer and extra batteries just in case. After setting everything up, the event took place.
I turned on the still camera and left it in the back and with the help of my friends, we were able to check it was recording at all times (LO5). Lucianna and Elsa also helped me move the still camera when the dances began as they took place were the camera was positioned.
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Meanwhile, I went close to the stage to film the singers and performers so that there was more material to work with for the video. It was a lot of fun because while everybody had to be sat down, I could walk and even go on stage to film the action.
First up all the students and staff sung happy birthday to the school. During this time, I filmed the faces of the students and the reaction of the Headmaster of the school. Afterwards, short reenactments of school events were shown. Some of them were a PE class when Markham was an all boy school and outdoor education trips.
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The event also had a dance preformed by the students and four songs; three of which were solos and one sang by the choir. This part of the event was incredible as all the students enjoyed the music and had a good time.
To end the event, a section of a school play was performed so that the people that had not gone to see it, could appreciate what it was like. The play was a modern Romeo and Juliet and it caused all the students to laugh because it was a love story involving two friends of ours.
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After the main event, in the lawn, games and snacks were available to everyone. During this part I took pictures of everyone to show the good time the students were having. For me, the best activities were net football, throw a wet sponge, and the vegan food stand as it provided healthy food options.
During this experience I had three complications, which proved to me that I still need to improve my camera skills (LO1). The first problem was that every time I changed position, I had to readjust the ISO, focus, shutter speed, etc. and this took a long time. Also, I realized that filming an event that is taking place in real life in comparison with a scene from a film is much harder.
When filming short movies in my film class, if something went wrong I could always go back and film it and additionally, I knew were the actors were going to move. In contrast, the people on stage were moving any were they wanted and I had to guess were they were going to go next. This increased the difficulty because the filming has to be neat and focused but it was really hard in my situation.
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The last problem I encountered was that I had to be discrete when moving along the event because I could not disrupt. The last thing I wanted was to take off attention from the performances and ruin the event. Luckily, next time I am in a situation like the celebration of the 70 years of Markham, I will take this problems into account and I will grow and improve my skills each time I participate in similar events.
LO1: I had been taking film classes so I was able to participate but it was much different when it is a live event but at the end I managed to film everything.
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LO5: As it was a live event I could not cover all the angles of the action so with the help of some friends, this did become possible.