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Despite New Haven having no more movie theaters, it isn’t lacking in young, creative, and spooky-loving moviemakers — particularly at John S. Martinez School.
This October, sixth graders in the elective Audio/ Visual Technology (A.V. Tech) course at the Fair Haven magnet school wrote, directed, and edited three spooky movie trailers. The class is taught by Band, Instrumental Music and Digital Media Technology teacher Jose Lara.
In the class, the sixth grade AV team learned the fundamental skills of video editing and audio editing, with the Halloween season in mind.
Lara teaches the students skills such as chroma keying (i.e. green screens), video filters, video/ audio layering, basic video editing software (i.e. Clipchamp, iMovie), as well as how to setup the AV equipment involving cameras, lights, and sounds.
“These concepts and skills are scaffolded and built upon when the students continue in 7th and 8th grade. In those grades students have more direct engagement with school content creation ( Regular uploads to the school’s YouTube channel, editing videos and photos of school events and activities for upload, and now more recently Podcasting),” Lara said in a Wednesday email to the Independent.
When asked how the spooky film project came about, Lara explained that it happened organically. This is the second year Lara has taught the class.
Last year's first short film made by Martinez 6th graders.
“I was brainstorming of a way to have students independently apply some of the skills and concepts learned up to this point, and offer them creative freedom on how to use those skills. Short 1‑minute movie trailers seem like the easiest way to do so. The timing lined up perfectly since Halloween comes up around the time that we start this project and scary films are popular during the season,” he said.
Before the project was introduced to the students, Lara taught them basic video editing, filters, effects and layering using Clipchamp, a free web-based video editor.
One of the first assignments for the class at the start of the year was creating 10-second layered looping GIF images. Next the students moved on to learn iMovie.
“iMovie was a perfect tool for the students to use since the software has a built-in trailer tool. With the trailer tool, students can easily see how to storyboard the trailer, edit title cards and taglines, as well as organizing their shots for the trailer. Although the same results can be achieved using Clipchamp, iMovie facilitates teaching this process with the embedded tools,” Lara said.
The students drafted a script for their actors, storyboarded the trailers with taglines throughout, and organized their shots for the short movies.
Last year the students made a short film that was a parody of the online video game Among Us.
“The students were encouraged to get silly with it to further add to the thriller/humor,” Lara said about last year’s project.
This year the students went the extra step with bringing in costumes for their films, which were made using iPads.
Watch the trailers above.