Students in the Grade 8 French immersion class from St. Thomas Aquinas High School will be getting a taste of film making by creating and then submitting short films into the Festival de Videastes du Manitoba.
This is the first time the school has taken part in the Winnipeg French film festival, which is open to high school students across Canada but mainly sees entries from Manitoba. French immersion teacher, James Trudeau, explains how the project came about.
"A former St. Thomas Aquinas student, Debbie Girard said I'm working for this festival in Winnipeg. It's all French as a second language kids and they make movies and we'll send out a facilitator and he'll work with the kids for the whole week," he said. "We just thought it was a perfect fit. There's a push to have the students do something real with their language to get away form worksheets and, 'Repeat after me.' [With this] They're researching French language films, French expressions, it's not just a direct translation, it's authentic."
Students in the class have been divided into groups and must work together to write, film, act in and edit their short videos for the festival. This week they were working with Guillaume Allain, a facilitator from the film festival who works with students to help them with their videos.
"The first thing we did is, I asked them to pick up a scene they liked in a movie and try to re-make that. It's a way to get hands on before they do their own filming," said Allain. "There were a lot of mistakes, they made it their way and didn't respect how it was originally filmed so after that we talked a lot about what a shot is in a movie so close-up, wide-angle. We also talked a lot about how to create a script, how to use the camera, how to use the DSLR and how to use the editing software, they'll be working with Final Cut Pro."
The students spent the entire week getting hands on experience working with the cameras as well as creating a storyboard for their film. This year's theme of the festival is "Courage". All films submitted must somehow reflect the theme.
Grade 8 student, Leah Wykes said it was a really neat experience.
"You watch a movie and you don't think much about it, but going through this process, you realize how difficult it is. I was watching a movie last night and we were learning about, shot reverse shot which is where you have someone talking and you have the shoulder of the other person they're talking to in it and then it switches. That's all I could think about when people were talking is the camera work we've been learning about," she said.
Wykes's group is doing a film about a son who wants to prove how brave he is to his father so he buys a shark, puts it in a tank and jumps across the tank on a motorcycle, à la Evel Kneivel.
This is the 28th year that the festival has run and although it is open to students across Canada, Allain says most who submit are from Manitoba.
"We're based in Winnipeg but we have some schools from Quebec and New Brunswick and this will be the first time we have a school from Ontario, so that's pretty cool," he said.
The students will continue to work on their short films over the winter. In February, local filmmaker and owner of Upriver Media Inc., Matt Kennedy, will help the students finish their pieces and get them ready for submission. The big gala will take place in May.
"It's pretty exciting," said student Ali Phillips. "We were watching the guy that has won for the past few years and his videos are really good. At the start we're panicking, what do we do? But you watch the other movies and [those students] were probably in the same position as us and their videos turned out amazing so hopefully ours can look like that too."
All of the short films will be shown at the gala and like any other cinema festival it will include prizes for Best Editing, Best Actor, Best Picture and more.