Welcome to our advice page which we hope will inspire and inform your teaching about the moving image. These practical and curriculum related articles and approaches to creating schemes of work will be developed over the coming months.

We believe that it is important to look at issues around the moving image from a critical, creative and cultural point of view when using film in the classroom.

From 2005 to 2009 Film Education ran an annual conference – CP3 – which examined the interrelationship between these three approaches. We are pleased to bring you a selection of key articles written by workshop leaders which explore a variety of activities, ideas and issues around the moving image.

We hope that these articles will give you some food for thought as you plan your future lessons about the moving image. We shall be adding new articles over the coming months.

Please note that we have used the original versions of the articles. Contact details and job positions are undoubtedly out of date. Please contact us if you wish to get in touch with any of the authors.

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Interactive Whiteboards and Digital Video

Whiteboards have been the ‘buzz’ kit of recent years but are they actually of any use when teaching with digital media, or are they merely a projector screen with detachable bits that you end up losing? The session aimed to explore, through examples and hands-on experience, how the board's own software can be used as part of the teaching sequence, using digital media, at Key Stages 2 and 3. The focus primarily fell on literacy but clear links can also be made across the curriculum. - Andrew Stogdale
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Documentary and Archive

Documentaries and archive materials are not just from and about the ancient past. We are creating and participating in documentaries and archives all the time and perhaps never more so than in the digital age with the pervasive nature of sound and image recording and playback devices. How are we to make sense of this world and navigate this sea of information? - Jane Dickson
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Digital Animation

Using ICT-based animation within the classroom may seem to be a big challenge to the busy practitioner. This workshop dealt with various ways of getting started with ICT animation using approaches that are relevant to the Art curriculum. We used Photoshop and Flash software. One approach was to ask participants to take a series of digital still images which they get the computer to animate. We then built on the concept of a timeline and showed how Flash can be used to create a variety of different animations. - Ed Hunton, Richard Knights & Alistair Fitchett
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Anti-narrative: Games, Blogs & other Non-linear Forms

‘Narrative cannot survive the Moment of Information’, so said the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, talking of film in its early days. Today the same claims are being made, but this time in relation to the internet, mobile phones and other information and communication devices. - Dr Caroline Bassett
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Digital Storytelling – Using Podcasting and Vodcasting

This session explored the use of Podcasting and Vodcasting as vehicle for digital storytelling and ways that still images, audio and video can be combined to communicate strong narratives and messages in the classroom. - David Baugh
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Critical Transformations Intertextuality in the Digital Age

"This workshop set out to explore what we might mean by ‘reading’ in a society where much of the information received by citizens comes from multimodal sources. It began from the premise that current assessment models of ‘reading’, and associated panics about low levels of literacy, are founded on a limited notion of what it is to be a reader in a digital age." - Martin Phillips
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20 Shots

"This workshop will look at the idea of the camera frame – how you actually decide on what type of shot you can film (the aesthetic possibility). Through an exercise which combines both shooting and editing material, delegates explored the visual possibilities with regard to the selection of possible shots and different ways of editing these shots together." - Ian Wall
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Asking the Questions

One of the earliest questions asked by children is ‘why?’ And this is the very question that we need to ask about moving image texts. Why is a particular camera angle chosen? Why are particular objects placed within a frame? And why are they placed where they are? Why is the camera placed in a certain position? Why does a particular character wear what they are wearing? - Ian Wall
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