Winter Birds

Here’s a very short film shot on a Canon 550D with 18-55 kit lens. What makes this one significant is that it was shot by my 6 year old son. While my wife and daughter jetted off to Miami for the half term break, Trystan and I stayed behind and spent some quality time together. One of Trystan’s goals for the week was to go out and shoot a film with me and here it is!

Of course he got a bit of help with video settings and post processing but he composed his own shots and selected them in post. He chose the colour grading (a bluish hue to convey how cold it was) and he even chose the soundtrack to purchase from the very excellent audionetwork.com. We had a great time out together and he couldn’t wait to share his work with his class.

While we may have used slightly more sophisticated gear to put this together, I see kids now producing films all the time thanks to the iPad revolution. Learning film techniques, once the domain of a high school class or club, is now the mainstay of integrated, lower school learning. Students as young as 6 are becoming the curators of their own learning by using the iPad to capture audio, video and stills. This is unprecedented.

It will be interesting to see what emerges from this. With few preconceived ideas, young students are developing film techniques through experimentation and I wonder how much of that experience will filter out to traditionally accepted practice and how much will result in new ways of seeing and recording the world around us. Exciting times!