Writing for the Big Screen

Writing for the Big Screen: Literacy Experiences in a Moviemaking Project by Carol Bedard and Charles Fuhrken

Image-dominated texts are becoming more and more prevalent. Just look out our social-media. How easy is it to flip through all the text written on our feeds until we see an image that we like. I can't be the only one. In addition, there has been an emergence of multi-modal perspectives. These are texts or features that include an combination of talk, gesture, image, sound, and movement.

With this article, a 6-week long curriculum was created for an over-the-summer project. Over 100 students participated with the goal of learning moviemaking strategies along side their reading and writing curriculum. The goal was that by incorporating film, the students' views as readers and writers would shift to make them more aware of what they were doing.

This strategy was based on scaffolds and sequences. Each moviemaking activity was sequences with a literacy activity. In turn, it was used as a scaffold into the next step. In this way, students were able to feel accomplished with each piece of the moviemaking puzzle.

In the end, students were offered and learned new strategies and processes in their roles as readers and writers because they were thinking from a film makers point of view.