FCPX/Video Production instructor sharing...

Hello all,

I'm new as a member, but love this site as a resource. Thankful that it's here!

I'm an instructor teaching video production to high school students in the Upstate of South Carolina. I love it, but one of my biggest issues, is that when it comes to post, it's very difficult to keep all the students engaged when they're in groups. Typically, the one editing is fine, and they might have one other group member engaged in the edit, but the other two to three group members are easily distracted.

Paint the picture: This is typically with my seniors, as they are doing larger projects, and thus need large groups to complete a project. As we all know, there are certain rolls that are done, once the pre-production is complete, or the production is complete, so when it gets to post, you end up having a number of students who may have performed their job roles fine, but are now "out of a job" so to speak.

I've thought of mini-projects, but that quickly becomes a grading nightmare, because I've got 4 different schools from two different districts, in each class.

I guess I'm sorta seeing if there's anyone out there that has a process that they use in a similar situation that I could can look into....

If you have the resources for everyone to have their own edit station, have each member of the group make their own cut.

I did a teen filmmaking bootcamp at LSU for a couple of years. We had 10 iMacs and almost 30 kids. I had 3 kids to each edit team. More than that is horrible. Keep them no larger than groups of 3, you should be fine.

Side note; They thought I was nuts, because up until then, each had a production job/title, and did it, on one single film. But in the end, when we screened them, each edit team had a VERY different version of the story. It was fun.

Tom and Ben have have good ideas. You could also split the post responsibilities : Graphics and packaging, color grading, sound design, compositing ... if the projects are design to permit this.

for the last couple of yeras I'm teaching 'video' volunteerly at my sons school. We had for instance with graduates a 'How To Survive High School'; every scholar had his own story, directed the recordings and had to edit it ==>> tons of ideas, millions of "I would like to express…"… but I can not show… Due to they were their own writer, DoP, director and editor, they instantly learned what's missing, what doesn't work, or, what all made wrong, "movie is no filmed theatre play", thinking of staging, blocking, editing ("film is the thing in your mind between two frames")…

We adopted that for our workshop, difference is, 'contestants' are now 12y, not 18... = theme was given by us; simple stuff "how to treat a teacher?" etc. But again: they have to stage, film and edit their own material.

Organisational challenging, we have one single Mac :huh:
Max 3 kids at once, max 1h.

What I found out, aside the youth is unbridled in using technology:
They grew up with millions of hours TV/cinema - but practically none was able to think in terms of cinematography! A few were good in photography/'framing', but things like 'establishing, shot/counter shot, axis, flow' etc - no idea! Watching is not making. You have to teach THAT.

And 'teaching' comes in many flavors, some like top-down = first theory, then making; others have a more 'just do it' approach.

Having survived a university of technology video diploma course, I found the biggest problem was people would tend to migrate to what they liked best, some for script writing, some to camera, some to sound capturing, others into editing, and sound effect editing.

Through my career as a tv news video editor, I was often swearing at the tv camera crew for not having enough shots to cover a story, "You should not pick up a camera until you have 200 inserts under your belt.." I would say loudly and often, and I believe it, it is easy to shoot what you think is enough, leave it to the innocent editor to make something out of nothing.

My suggestion is why not get the students not editing to do a sort of behind the scenes of the making of, sort of project, this way they are re-exposed to more shooting, thinking about what to cover, everyone has a smart phone, the quality is not important, it is the time doing the thing, they can edit this and submit with the actual project.

Karsten is right, we are really in the world of the arts, either you have it or you don't. I have the "eye" for editing, but I am blind to camera operations, no I cannot do that, even though I have 2000 inserts edited, I can direct a 3 camera studio shoot, as I am thinking like an editor.

Photography be it stills or video, you need that x factor, I can be taught what the buttons do, how to frame, but seeing that 1 moment in time, or that special sequence, that is talent, not skill, talent you are born with, skill you develop.

Maybe my training, and using tape in a linear format with extreme deadlines honed a way of thinking, of seeing the whole edit then sitting down to create what I see in my head. Not sure if that is talent or skill, or both...

Just thinking, what about mini projects like time lapse, or fixing a simple thing, or an hour with the post man, dog walker, fireman checking equipment, simple 1 day-1 hour projects, with a series of editing tasks, this develops skills.

Casey Niestat is vlogging every day, and some days, his vlogs are as dull as watching paint dry, the point he is forcing himself to find a story every day, and some days it is not easy, but he does find at least 8 min a day to edit.

@TomWolsky As a matter of fact they do have their own edit station. However, we do not have enough production gear (cameras, microphones, lights) for everyone.

@BenB I'd love to keep it to three per team, but often I have requirements in rubrics that necessitate more than three; i.e. dolly shots which require a dolly grip, camera operator, and then the principle actors. I've also done a similar project with stop-motion in which the students operate as a team for the production end, but when it gets to post-production they all have to do their own version. Sometimes that be a lot of fun to see the differences, other times, they fight you in order to make them all the same.

@Francois That's a good idea too, and I've often required my students to do just that, but typically what happens is the one student in the group that enjoys/is apt at editing, is also the only one in the group that actually does the work. Although, this is becoming less of a problem as the students move through the course. (Long story short, I'm changing the program from strictly TV news broadcasting to film and advertising, and I'm still dealing with students who didn't sign up for that. Ugh.)

@KarstenSchlüter "They grew up with millions of hours TV/cinema - but practically none was able to think in terms of cinematography! A few were good in photography/'framing', but things like 'establishing, shot/counter shot, axis, flow' etc - no idea! Watching is not making. You have to teach THAT." So true! I've come up with a new project that addresses this; where they listen and describe the number of shots in a simple two person conversation from a movie, and then have to film their own two person conversation scene using the exact same number and types of shots. I'll let you know how that goes.

@MsJustine You're totally right with your first thought, and it's so hard to get them to understand the value of knowing how to do multiple tasks, even if you're only going to concentrate on your favorite.

I've also thought about putting them on a project like the documentary as well, but what's happened in the past with much smaller projects, is that as soon as it gets to post, the rest vanish and leave it all to one person. Plus, I'm teaching two school districts, with two different grading logins, and sometimes have to login to another teacher's grade books because we have some students have have both of us year round, and others that switch at the semester or quarter, and the schools and districts treat us as one class even though we're technically split between radio broadcasting and my class.....! Anyway, it's already a juggle with the way it's setup (and totally out of my control and my school's control) that finding a solution that keeps students on task grade-wise and isn't a nightmare for grading is difficult to say the least.

The way we're set up is that I have an introductory class at the sophomore level that is only a quarter of the year long, which means I see 4 sets of different sophomores in one school year. In that course it's the basics to still photography with a transition to cinematography via a stop-motion project. The still photography helps the students understand the basics of composition, exposure, and lighting for emotion. Then the stop-motion they get hands on experience with time as it applies to video (FPS).

At the junior level, it's all about the software for the first half of the semester. Lot's of tutorials, almost all individual work. In my experience the old adage that youngsters know technology better than old people gets proven wrong time after time after time after time. They only know a few social media apps on their smart phones, and that's it. They don't even know all there is to know about how to use Camera on their iPhones!!! Anyway, this gets them used to using keyboard shortcuts and not relying on the mouse all the time. I'd love to have them film their own material to do the tutorials with, but we'd never get to the tutorials if we did that. Then the second half is grip bootcamp, where they learn about production gear, how to care for it, store it, use it, etc. And we wrap up the course with a few mini-projects that allow them to do the whole process from start to finish. These are done in groups, and sometimes are individual grades and sometimes group grades.

Finally at the senior level, we do film criticism for the first half of the quarter, then do grip bootcamp as a refresher from the summer break, move on to small group work making content for our YouTube channel (new video due every three days) and then wrap this course with a senior project where they must find a local non-profit company to work for creating both radio and video content for. It's a fairly large project and this will be my first year doing it. And a part of that project is doing VLOGS. I had tried doing those last year, but having to sit through them every day, and grade every one of them (I found out that if I started averaging them together the students wouldn't do them as often and their grades would tank) it was faaaaar too much grading.

So all this leads me to my original post, and why I'm looking for ideas for those mini-projects that can be completed by individuals, even if they are shot in small groups.

Thank you all for replying!!! Sorry for the late replies, but I've been wrapping up all the grading for the first semester.