Digital Video

People have always communicated. It's the very core of our humanity. From the very first hunter-gatherers who worked collaboratively to stay alive and probably developed language as a survival necessity, through to modern day life in all its complexity, we have always communicated.

We communicate for collaboration, just like our earliest ancestors, but also for education and entertainment, and for most of our history it has been through sounds and images. Seated around their campfires, our predecessors would tell stories of past times and of bold adventures. It's how the next generation learned the history and customs of their society. The cave paintings left in those early homes provide a visual record of the events those stories will have contained.

Over time, writing was invented and it became the standard form for recording, teaching, learning and even entertaining. But the sights and sounds didn't disappear. They lived on in the theatre where actors would tell the same stories of past times and heroic deeds, acting them out against a backdrop of scenery which provided the visual setting and created atmosphere.

In our lifetimes, we have moved so far down the written road that you could be forgiven for thinking that writing is the only way to tell stories, to entertain or to impart knowledge. Children spend a solid hour every single day learning and mastering the intricacies of the written form. They learn how to spell words and how to craft them into sentences that tell a story, argue a point, persuade or simply entertain. They learn how to select nouns to identify their characters. They learn how to use adjectives to create mental images and verbs to tell readers what is happening. They even use adverbs to describe the action and generate excitement, fear or pathos.

An hour a day. Every day. Learning the literacy of the written word.

But the rest of their lives are spent in a world which has moved on. Perhaps it has come full circle and returned to a more natural time when communication was all about sight and sound. In their lives outside school our pupils are entertained, educated and persuaded through the medium of moving images - film and television - and a very powerful medium it is.

This medium has a literacy all of its own. Where an author creates mood by his or her choice of words, the filmmaker uses camera angles, lighting and a soundtrack. This is the literacy of the moving image and it's just as valid as the literacy of the written word. The results can be as powerful as any written text, if not more so, and can affect the mood of an entire cinema audience at the same time, not just an individual reader.

Until recently, very few people had access to the medium of the moving image. Highly paid film directors and television producers were the only ones who could harness this medium and the influence they wielded was considerable. But now, with the steady increase in computer processor power, the ability to create movies has arrived on everybody's desktop and with Revelation Sight & Sound from Logotron, your children can begin to do this right now.

The children in your class can now choose to create a movie almost as easily as they can choose to create a piece of written work and it surely can't be long before we, as teachers, set them not an essay but a film piece.

Of course, as they try their hands at creating movies, they will need to learn a new literacy, the literacy of the moving image.

It's a literacy which has evolved and developed during the one hundred years since motion photography was invented. The very first films, apart from being silent, were somewhat static creations. The camera, which was heavy and hand-cranked, would be fixed on a tripod and pointed at the actors who behaved as if they were on a stage. It's not surprising. This was a new technology and at first it mimicked the old. Early filmmakers had no concept of a studio or a film-set but they were familiar with the proscenium arch and its backdrop of scenery. This was a well-developed art form.

Over the years moving image literacy has grown beyond anything those early filmmakers could have imagined. Nowadays a single scene will be composed of many "shots" - short clips of film. Each shot will show aspects of the scene from different distances - long, medium or close-up - and from different angles - high, low or eye-level. Then there is the lighting. The scene may be brightly lit, even overexposed (think of Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or it may be lit from below, giving an eerie, threatening or ghostly feel. The soundtrack is a further element. The choice of music can affect a scene dramatically and can herald impending drama. Think of films you have watched in which a happy scene suddenly takes on a note of impending trouble when the soundtrack introduces a sustained, deep note.

Children begin school more familiar with the literacy of moving images than with the written word. By the age of three, almost all of them have a collection of favourite videos which they know almost by heart and by the time they start school they are fluent in two languages - their mother tongue and the language of moving image literacy. Changes of size, angle, lighting and music all signal danger, comedy, excitement or a happy ending and they can read these signs fluently.

Sadly, many teachers believe there isn't time to share their own enthusiasm for films and television with their class. They tend to feel that moving images media are not good for children and detract from "real" education. The rigidity of the literacy hour does little to change this attitude. Yet the texts used in the literacy hour can be words, pictures, sounds or all three. Literacy is the art of communicating and in the modern world moving image media are as much part of literacy as traditional printed materials. To leave them out would be to disadvantage children.

So open your eyes to the use of digital video in your classroom. Don't be put off by the BECTa Digital Video Project in which selected schools were issued with extensive sets of hardware and software and encouraged to research the new opportunities. The truth is that it's much simpler than that.

You almost certainly already own a digital camera that you use to take photographs. Have a look at it and you'll probably find that it can capture short movies. They transfer to your computer along with the still images but you probably haven't used this facility much because, after all, what do you do with them afterwards? You can't print them either as photographs or as illustrations in a Word document.

But add Revelation Sight & Sound from Logotron and suddenly a whole new world will open up before your eyes. Together with the activity book which accompanies the software, you'll immediately find yourself using these short movies to create films. String them together in sequence; add a soundtrack; select transitions; add a title and you'll be amazed at what you've created. So amazed that you'll probably want to add credits at the end. You probably won't have as many people involved as those long lists you see at the end of Hollywood films but you will be surprised at how many people can be involved in the making of a short film. As an opportunity for collaboration, problem solving and group working, making movies really is second to none.