St Michael’s Victorian News Reports

St Michael’s Primary School, Alkrington recently visited Middleton City Learning Centre to make use of the state-of-the-art television studio and production faciltities including the 'green-screen' filming technology.

The students planned to perform a series of 'Victorian News Reports' on topics such as 'The Crimea War', 'Chimney Sweep Strikes' and 'The Whitechapel Murders' by Jack the Ripper. The class had worked in small groups at school to put together scripts to perform. Each group contained two 'news-readers' who would be based in the ‘tv studio’ and 'roving reporters' who would interview Victorian characters dressed in costumes supplied by the CLC.

Filming took place in the CLC's tv studio and in front of the Chromakey curtain or 'green-screen' background which allowed the 'live' filming to be mixed with a series of video and still background images that had been researched and collected by the groups.

As each group filmed their reports the remainder of the class were in an adjacent room creating music and audio tracks using Apple's Garageband software. During the day students learnt about making films including camera angles, filming out of sequence, continuity and editing. They also discovered that some of the things they wanted to do could not be done and so needed to work together to come up with a different idea to complete their broadcasts.

At the end of a very busy day all the completed filming was stored onto a recording tape and staff from the City Learning Centre worked on the editing of the films including adding the background images. A DVD was presented to the school containing each groups’ news reports.

For further information on this activity please contact Melody Smith on 01706 630191.