Elizabeth Olliver, Sarah Bush, Kristina Russell & Holly Fletcher
Middle School Activities Movie
St Margaret's College
Year 9 ICT, full year unit
Teacher: Trudy Keys
Elizabeth, Sarah, Kristina, and Holly were challenged to plan, produce, and edit a movie celebrating the activities of the school's middle school students (Years 7-9) during the year.
They started by brainstorming the types of activities students would be involved in – school camps, sporting meets and school work in a variety of subjects. Because some events had already occurred, the girls had to either use images taken at the time or recreate scenes to shoot.
The girls aimed for an even balance of material from Years 7, 8, and 9, and to cater for the different tastes and interests of the project's three groups of stakeholders – students, parents and teachers.
The girls learnt how to use iMovie software as they went, and soon found their creative choices depended on how quickly they could learn the program. They also learnt as much as they could from their teacher and picked up skills from other students who had made their own discoveries.
To make better use of photos in the project, the girls studied the work of American filmmaker Ken Burns who makes creative use of still photographs in his documentaries. Rather than simply zoom into a whole image, the girls learnt to pan across it, selectively zooming into parts of the image. The girls also found fading music in-and-out was technically challenging.
The end result was an action-packed collage of photos and moving images set to a soundtrack of modern music with a truly professional look and feel.
The film was shown at the Middle School prize-giving after being judged best 
production of all the films made by the Year 9 ICT class.
Teacher comment
I was impressed with the thorough planning and development the girls recorded, a stage that is often lost when you work as a group. The judges liked the way they had planned out music to match certain photos and showed some very good use of imovie's advanced technical features.