Digital video

Project resource
Example movies
Research into DV

Digital video is a medium with particular creative potential and relevance for art and design, reflecting time-based contemporary art practice. While stimulating their imagination and creativity, digital video projects simultaneously increase students' self-esteem and improve transferable key skills in logical and critical thinking, planning, communication, negotiation, teamwork and problem solving. The medium engages and excites.

While other subject areas strive to stimulate and foster creativity, it is intrinsic to art and design. Digital video projects can be delivered through discrete art and design assignments, or through cross-curricular projects that will help raise standards and tackle underperformance. Digital video is a powerful communication medium that supports a range of learning styles, whether visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic/tactile.

Project resources

Digital Video and Video Art - plan a digital video project with movie ideas specifically for art and design. The project has web links for contextual studies in contemporary art practice, tips on film techniques, a checklist of characteristics of video art for pupils to use as a scaffold for writing or discussion, a blank storyboard, assessment criteria and other adaptable help-sheets to download, plus a step-by-step tutorial on how to capture and edit DV with Windows MovieMaker. These support resources can also be accessed directly from the links below.

How to operate a camcorder - a simple guide to using a digital video camera.

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Video greetings cards - follow this tutorial to create a seasonal video-in-a-video greeting in just two or three lessons. You can adapt the techniques to create other movie-in-movie effects e.g. a photo or painting in a frame that comes to life, a newsreader interacting with a foreign correspondent or news reporter on location shown on a screen in the background. Two different techniques are explained. It uses Serif MoviePlus as a video editor, but you can adapt the techniques for other software.

Digital video storyboard - a blank template.
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Digital video web links 76KB

Stop frame animation - use this tutorial to create an issue-based movie using stop motion techniques.

Editing with Windows Movie Maker - step-by-step tutorial as a web page or PDF document

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Video techniques and conventions - a quick illustrated reference to types of shot, viewpoint, camera movement and key terms.

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Assessment criteria for new media - download an assessment grid for digital video projects that can easily be adapted by deleting or adding criteria and also find grids for assessing other digital media.

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Video art checklist - questions to consider for video art

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Insert a movie clip into a PowerPoint presentation

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Example movies

More videos will be added regularly, so keep checking back.

Blind Light & Event Horizon 2007 - The first major London exhibition of the work of British sculptor Antony Gormley, opened at the Hayward Gallery on May 17th. The video shows how the Central London skyline has been transformed by the appearance of 31 casts of the artist's body, four at ground level, cast in iron, and 27 on rooftops cast in fibreglass. Event Horizon is the largest ever public artwork in London. Blind Light, the sculpture for which the exhibition is named, is a brightly lit glass walled room filled with vapour. Navigating the cold damp space is disorientating and the blinding fluorescent light, as Gormley explains, " ...is the opposite of illuminating".(WMV)

Runaway - the opening sequence for an issue-based movie project about teenagers who run away from home made with MoviePlus. (WMV)

Finders' keepers - a Citizenship inspired project for year 6 pupils: the movie sets up a moral dilemma about returning lost property. Students could edit pre-recorded footage to develop their own endings or plan and film the next scene from scratch. MoviePlus (WMV).

Banksy: Street Stencils - A video montage of artworks by subversive UK guerrilla street artist Banksy photographed between 2005 - 2007 in and around the East End of London - Islington, Hackney, Shoreditch, Liverpool Street, Whitechapel, and Hoxton - mixed with quotes from his manifesto. The video could be used as a starter to introduce a project on stencil art (further resources to follow shortly). MoviePlus (WMV)

Urban cattle drive - for the London Architecture Biennale 2004 to celebrate Clerkenwell's origins as the last watering hole for drovers en route from the provinces to the livestock market at Smithfield, a small herd of cows and calves were driven along the historic drovers' route in the heart of the City to St John's Street where crowds picnicked outside the market on specially laid Astroturf. Unlike their nineteenth century predecessors, however, the cattle went safely home by truck to their Welsh farm at the end of the day. (WMV)

Test Site 2006 - An installation by Carsten Höller for the Turbine Hall at Tate Britain. It consists of five sculptural stainless steel and polycarbonate acrylic slides that spiral down from different levels with the longest a dizzying drop of 27 metres. The £300,000 structures were sponsored by Unilever. Höller is fascinated by "the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend." MoviePlus (WMV)

Dune - Sand, sun and wind on the Atlantic Coast at La Dune Du Pyla near Bordeaux, the biggest sand dune in Europe. Edited with Windows Moviemaker. (WMV)

The Flying Steamroller 2006 - A whimsical sculpture and performance by the American artist Chris Burden, presented by the South London Gallery. Counterbalanced by a large concrete block, the massive yellow steamroller, weighing in at 12 tons, gains sufficient momentum to lift off and fly around a central pivot for several minutes. The spectacle confounds expectations and lends a mystical touch to the former military parade ground outside Chelsea School of Art. MoviePlus (WMV)

Greetings - skaters at Somerset House: a movie-in-a-movie video card created with a mask in MoviePlus. (WMV)

Streetwise: boards, bikes and walls - graffiti and youth culture. MoviePlus(WMV).

Xmas card - lights on the South Bank: a movie-in-a-movie video card created with a Transform Envelope in MoviePlus.

Student work

The Street - an atmospheric homage to film noir directed by sixth form student Adam Longmore, inspired by a poem by surrealist Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, and introducing Marcelo Bayas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5e3g88qY1k

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Research into digital video for learning and teaching

Recent research projects undertaken by Becta (The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) into the use of video in teaching and learning found clear evidence of the positive impact that DV has on pupils’ engagement and behaviour, confirming that it enhances students’ motivation, widens access to the curriculum and encourages “both creativity and moving image literacy”.
http://partners.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=rh&rid=11258

In the DfEE report 'All our futures: Creativity, culture and education' (DfEE, 1999), creativity is described as being imaginative and purposeful thinking or behaviour that results in an original outcome which has value in relation to the objective.
http://www.ncaction.org.uk/creativity/whatis.htm

Other useful research

Students in the director's seat: teaching and learning across the school curriculum with student-generated video
Schuck, S. & Kearney, M. (2004), University of Technology, Sydney.

This project funded by Apple Computers Australia investigated the value and use of student-generated digital video for enhancing pedagogy in K-12 schools. It aimed to identify, examine and analyse pedagogical practices in relation to use of this technology in five case schools. Download the report in PDF format from:
http://www.ed-dev.uts.edu.au/teachered/research/dvproject/home.html

Research in Digital Video Editing by the British Film Institute
The Best Practice Research Scholarship scheme was set up by the Department for Education and Skills in 2000 to support teachers in small-scale classroom based research projects. The focus of the bfi projects has so far been on digital video editing - how pupils learn how to use it, how it changes the kind of work they can produce, how they interact while using it. Teachers set up small investigations into groups of pupils using DVE software and report on the impact. Eight reports have been published to date and are available on the bfi website with a summary sheet attached.:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/research/teachlearn/digied/

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