Dan Wagner, Senior Lecturer of the School of Performing and Screen Arts at Unitec has created an exciting new international project to enable students to learn more about creating films for wireless mobile devices.
Called ‘Entertainment Lab for the Very Small Screen’ (ELVSS), the project has just completed two years.
Students of the School will learn ‘more or less’ conventional filmmaking methodologies, he said.
“ELVSS is an experiment in acquiring footage with a whole new set of tools, repurposing their films for delivery in a whole new way: back onto the same devices with which they were shot, and trying on a new mind-set relating to their craft.
‘Structured uncertainty’
“We are challenging the students to demonstrate new approaches to traditional visual narrative conventions. There is already a well-established cinematic language for the 70-foot screen. Now we need one for the 70-millimetre screen,” he said.
Unitec Research Committee funded the Project, since it embraces Unitec’s philosophy of innovative teaching and learning.
“The pedagogy involves structured uncertainty. We inspire them with context, showing them mobile innovations that have already been trail-blazed. We challenge them to contribute to this newly developing cinematic language. The journey they take to achieve this is very much driven by them,” Mr Wagner said.
The first course started in 2011, and initially students experimented with the new medium, learning how to create something visually appealing to mobile phone viewers.
“We gave the students mobile devices and asked them to make movies. It was mind-blowing for these students of conventional filmmaking to put cameras in places they were not able to do so before, and to shoot anytime, because they had an HD camera in their pocket. They could keep the cameras in watertight bags, put them in fish tanks, or tape them to doors, steering wheels or bonnet of a car,” Mr Wagner said.
Global Project
As part of their learning process, the group connected with people doing similar projects in different parts of the world.
They met Helen Keegan, a Senior Lecturer in Social Technologies at the University of Salford in Manchester. She was able to send Mr Wagner examples of films created by her students, as well as those from mobile phone film festivals around the world.
Thirty-seven students from all over the world participated in the Project and they were divided into four teams.
“We divided the teams by specialisation, because the teams were small. Each team had personnel to handle writing, shooting, editing and production.
The first event of the project was the Great Global Hangout, where all the participants in New Zealand, UK and France got together at one time for a live video chat on Google + Hangouts.
The above appeared as a part of a large article titled, The Very Small Screen that appeared in the Autumn 2013 issue of Unitec’s Advance Magazine. Unitec is the sponsor of the ‘Business Excellence in Innovation’ category of the Indian Newslink Indian Business Awards 2013
