The article aims to identify and analyze the roles played by the script in the creative process of independent short film production. The theoretical framework is based on distributed creativity and sociomateriality. These approaches are complementary and helped us discuss how the script can shape the creativity of the subjects involved in the…

Cinema's pedagogical essence nurtures a variety of educational strategies. Beyond serving as a support to other areas of knowledge or as the subject of artistic analysis, it also provides students with a means to give -- freely and significantly -- voice to their own concerns and interests. Short film production in schools can offer a process for…

Austin Film Festival's Digital Storytelling Curriculum examines the art of storytelling as a critical tool for communication. Developed collaboratively with Austin Film Festival and Austin Independent School District secondary English teachers, Digital Storytelling is nine-week, English language arts screenwriting curriculum in which all students…

Purpose: This study aims to seek to demonstrate how explicit teaching of SFL metalinguistic and multimodal "grammars" enhanced 8-9-year-old children's deeper understanding and production of multimodal texts through critique of the construction of mini-documentaries about animals: the information, language of narration, composition of…

Although the benefits of using video as a learning tool in Extension programs are well known, less is understood about effective methods for creating videos. We present a five-step procedure for developing educational videos that focus on evidence-based practices, and we provide practical examples from our use of the five steps in creating a video…

Dvolver is a free moviemaking platform that allows users to employ animated characters to develop fun, concise scripts in a digital format. The author and a co-teacher created a 45-minute lesson plan for teaching students at the upper-beginner and lower-intermediate skill levels. The purpose of this article is to describe the utility of Dvolver…

The use of technology has proven to be a successful tool for enhancing the learning of children with disabilities. One example is the use of video-recorded social story movies as interventions for children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Through the use of electronic devices such as iPads, iPods and tablets, social stories are brought to…

Producing an animation requires extensive labor, time, and money. Experienced directors and screenwriters are required to design scenes using standard props and actors in position. This study structurally analyzes the script and defines scenes, characters, positions, dialogue, etc., according to their dramatic attributes. These are entered into a…

Preparing secondary students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for a variety of potential professions is important to enhance their postsecondary employment outcomes. This article provides step-by-step guidelines for practitioners to use video modeling interventions to develop the customer service skills of students with ASD who are employed or…

A film script is a useful tool for allowing students to experiment with language variation. Scripts of love stories comprise a range of language contexts, each triggering a different style on a formal-neutral-informal linguistic continuum: (1) technical cinematographic language in camera directions; (2) narrative language in exposition of scenes,…

This article details the work of third grade teacher, co-author Kim Heckart, as she engaged her students in making historical documentaries: a project that succeeded in reaching all of her third-grade students. For the last five years, Kim has required students to make historical documentaries. As her students produced these works, Kim conversed…

Writing a screenplay was an assignment that was part of Storytelling Through Film, a program sponsored by the Austin Film Festival, a professional film organization. In six weeks, students in creative writing and English classes first learned about the genre of screenwriting and then wrote original screenplays. The curriculum was a collaborative…

At the end of a biology course entitled Ecology, Evolution, and Genetics, students were asked to consider how their learning experience had changed their perception of either ecology or genetics. Students were asked to express their thoughts in the form of a "digital story" using readily available software to create movies for the purpose of…