Center Stage Youth Theatre

Posts Tagged ‘Silent Film’

This week at Glenforest I stationed myself behind a desk in order to give the message:  Please do not crash into me!  lol – it was a fun and low key week as we watched a modern silent film and had some great discussions on what is going on in the student’s lives, at home as well as at school and talked about the conventions of the movie includkng slapstick, comic timing and the use of the music to portray emotions.

The last thing I said to the students before we parted ways on Friday afternoon was that God Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise we will begin production Monday!  Keep your fingers crossed…we hae spent a great deal of time preparing for this project.  Now to discover:  Um…can we do it?

I think the answer to that question is a resounding YES!  but only with this quote firmly ensconced in our psyches:  You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.

Ready for the preparatory chaos!

Well, we are not going to hit the ground running, as I am still not up to full speed, but we will spend this week finishing up a script read to give us a skeleton for our film, creating and painting cardboard cut out sets, and I plan to show Mel Brook’s movie Silent Film this week as well, for a bit of quiet fun and another look at the way we can do film without dialogue.  The only spoken word in the movie is at the very end, when Marcelle MArceau says:  “non!”

Predictible?  Yes.  But I love it, and Mel too!

I can’t wait to see those kids!

The middle and high school kids and our music teacher and I have jumped into the study of silent film and how the soundtrack effects us as we watch it with both feet this week.  We have been showing the children different types and genres of silent films and asking them to pay particular attention to what the music is telling them during each scene.

This coming week we will begin work on a storyboarding project, asking the students to storyboard the production of Peter and the Wolf we watched and then – take a deep breath – asking them to come up with the story for their own silent film and to create a storyboard for that one.

Sounds simple?  I am not sure what will happen!  But if I know these guys – and I feel like I am starting to know them -  it will be a fun, quirky and very original project.  And chaotic, of course, at least at first.  But at times like this I always remind myself :

You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.

OK, future dancing stars, let’s get started…

I have had the most delightful last nine weeks with my FAW group of kids.  They worked well and got along well (ok, for the most part) happily took part in helping me prepare for the show by constructing and building and even velcro-ing the pipe system for hanging the black curtains. And  I have been sad to think that it was almost time for us to change groups, though I had definitely missed some of the other Drama oriented FAW kids and was looking forward to working with them again as well.

So I was really excited when our music teacher suggested that we work together on a project.  She told me that in her music class she had played ragtime for the kids, and they had really enjoyed it.  And when she explained to them how it worked during the silent film era, with the music as the background, they became very excited and had a great time creating little silent scenes to go with the music.

So that’s what we have decided to do.  And in this way the current drama kids will not have to move over for another bunch, as we can incorporate them all into the drama/music class while adding another set of kids for this big project.  We’ll have twice as many kids as usual, but we will also have two teachers and lots of material to work with.  I’m really looking forward to getting started tomorrow!