Stop-motion French Revolution
April 10th & 12th, 2017In this workshop, History students will create short stop-motion videos that capture the drama and division of certain episodes during the French Revolution or inspired by it, such as the Haitian Revolution.
The students will work in groups of 6, taking on various roles such as writer, director, set builder and so on. They will read a variety of primary sources as well as their text book to learn the history of the episode their group is responsible for (such as the Storming of the Bastille, or the Tennis Court Oath), and they will then plan a storyboard and script. This will allow students to feel creative control over the material as well as responsibility to the class and to each other for producing a good product.
Once Jessie Curell of Hands-on-Media-Education comes in, she will teach the students how to effectively shoot the video and how to edit it—inserting subtitles, sound effects, and so on
Project Update
Jessie Curell taught students the three phases of film-making: the script-writing/clay figure phase; the filming phase,wherein the clay figures are moved less than a millimeter for smooth motion and as much as a thumb for less continuous action; and the post-production phase where we edited our footage and added sound and subtitles. The end results were wonderful. The student films told the story of various phases of the French Revolution, starting with the inequality that led to it and ending with the influence of the revolution on other parts of the world such as Haiti. Here is a link to a timeline of the period, with the student films embedded into it. The first one appears on about the 10th slide and is called “The Inequality of the Estates.” In total, there are six films, which can be seen at the appropriate moment in the timeline.
