Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ANNIE POWELL:

I think one of the key things that we did was just before we sent them off to film we actually asked them to write down exactly where they were going. I gave them time slots for where they needed to be to interview one of the particular colleagues. And then they had to write down the order in which they were going to go to certain places.

I think the students very quickly realised it was very important not to be all in the same area filming at the same time because they couldn't get the sound to work. There was too much noise and so they would be interviewing someone but there would be noises off of someone else being interviewed. They went off and it was slightly alarming at one point because I couldn't see where anyone was. In fact, there was one group on our roof garden and there was one group down in the museum, another group interviewing someone else that I hadn't even expected. So they were really very focused and very efficient in their filming.

We had lots of goodwill. We had students coming to help. We had other teachers coming in to help and all of them enjoyed it, felt they were doing something positive.

And the editing phase required all sorts of other skills like we got assistance from some of our colleagues. The head of ICT kindly came in to help the students get started. They had to download their film footage and then open up the package which we have on the school system, which they were not familiar with. They'd not actually used it before and they then had to start putting together their cut of their docutube.

The students found that quite a challenge. They wanted to do everything. They wanted to make their docutubes look like sort of million-dollar films if they could. I think it was interesting that there were moments of kind of despair as things didn't work in the way that they'd wanted to and they were briefly despondent when they realised that they hadn't quite filmed the thing that they thought they'd filmed.

The fact that they had such a short amount of time we emphasised that it wouldn't be perfect. The point is to try and tell their story and focus on the story they're telling. And that was really useful, actually, because they accepted very quickly that they couldn't quite do the most perfect film but they could tell their story. And they turned out to be very resilient.