welcome everybody my name is andrew mount for and i'm the executive director of basic it's the belmont after school in richmond collaborative and we are here today with some of our young filmmakers it is an exciting night for basic and for all of our filmmakers because it is our  first basic premiere showing four films made by young filmmakers here in belmont we want to thank belmont media center for hosting us tonight and giving us this platform to showcase the work and i'd like to introduce dermis smith he is our film instructor working with basic for three years now and has produced a lot of fantastic films with our young filmmakers showcasing what they can do creatively but also teaching them important elements of media literacy so i'm going to turn it over to dermot before we watch our first film thank you thanks i'm through so welcome everyone thanks to the belmont media center thank you two and room for setting this up to the students the students make a film and in the after school program we geared specifically like a digital digital literacy program the best way to learn digital literacy is to make films and the kids construct shoot them up with concepts of all their films and they they learn a great deal amount of digital literacy while doing so and i think this is really important i'd like to also thank andrew on the basic program because they do recognise the importance of digital literacy in this age when kids have so much bombarded at them from the internet and television part of what we do is teach them how to construct images but also to decode images from what they see on television on the internet etc so without further ado what i want to do is introduce the first film it's called nathan's news and this is the  filmmakers that made that after we watch the film we're going to talk to the panel on please encourage all the parents to me to ask the kids questions about the process and so on and so forth so without furthe education and some good things like the school here in belmont it's great i got all i wanted i wanted some classes i wanted to learn how to be a normal now we're in one of the hallways of the very nice burbank school now we are going to catch some footage of the ninja who is currently attending think we just did all the editing after the whole the film dermot probably did a little bit of editing it went in the middle of it but most of it was at the end of th classes so we just sort of in frame you know one time we were trying to like well member only made one and it didn't turn out as good because we had like written scripts already and some people kept on adding to it and we just decided to add on to every time well it was it took on the average about three because it was so hard to do so many of the films without messing up because if you think about all the different characters in that and all the differing funny parts they put in we kept laughing over the scenes over and over again for those who haven't you know made films in the audience you know some of those scenes we get really sucked into it as a viewer but part of why we get sucked into that are seeing it from one angle and they were seeing you know nathan's face they were seeing the interviewer face can you talk about what that's like trying to you know film a scene a couple times because you want to have it from from different angles so to get like different like like like reacting and stuff we might sho like like let's say i was shooting you guys and i just had the whole audience and then maybe our using and then we shot that scene and then maybe we did the scene again and we just focused on one person's face and then instead of like we shoot a big shot and then we go and close and so on back and forth we just cut parts out and edit and yeah well it was a little it's a little bit hard to not plan anything so we had to plan out the basic background and structure and then once we kind of had an idea of like what we were doing and how like what the mood was going to be so that everybody kind of knew how to act we we kind of had it planned out based the basics but the details we could just kind of improvise on to make it for fun more fun for us because you can always retake it one hundred more times it doesn't as many times as you mess up you can just keep retaking it so we improvised par some of them we had to cut out because it didn't balance evenly with all of the scenes together we had to cut out some of them but otherwise not many scenes got cut out i think they did a lot more improvising because it's kind of hard to do so that's really each different monster or for every different person and so i guess we just sort of thought of what we wanted to do and like should i thought it was a little different than what we generally do because this was i thought it was a little you easier because  like the scenery or like when we did the aliens we had to get characters like off the computer and that took a little longer and  for the shorter videos we didn't cover as much area i don't think we covered as much area as we did in the bigger movies we made  yeah and it was kind of different from our other films that we typically do because normally it's more of like a story than like an interview kind of a thing so it's more like not so much of like someone saying and how you feel about this and all that stuff  like let's say bellow is talking or something and then the camera would focus on my face to see my reaction on what bella was saying instead of just seeing moving lips and then we might cut back to bella like how she was saying it like like was she angry when she was saying was she upset you know was she happy and how it was my expression we kind of did it so that people wouldn't just see how the character like what the character was doing how they were expressing themselves but they wanted to show how nathan reacted to it like how he felt about what the other person was this stuff like nathan kind of felt kind of shocked when elvis was singing so you probably meant for us to be kind of like wow this guy's a little bit much but so in t v shows or new shows like they'll you can see the reaction of the narrator so what we did is we kind of did the same thing except we we should  showed more of the the nathan's face then a lot lot of other people to see his reaction how he felt about it in that's what we  to be like you usually don't know what the narrator is sinking so like it's just you're seeing what their reaction   what's the word in it people that do funny things like elvis presley wiggling his hips i know that's a big hit with all you people and some people are just naturally funny and so i think part of it was knowing how other people would react to it and the other part was just being ourselves just natural comedians and like we said before we kind of planned out kind of what we're going to say like some kind of lines but it was mostly like probably just kind of went with it and did funny things we went with these crazy ideas and these crazy funny things we just improvised on it like bella and julia said and that made it a lot funnier because we like we didn't really think about it too much we just kind of felt like they would react to it this way or that way so we never really knew how people would react us well i think anything was really that really surprising because i mean like we could really like do something too too crazy but  like some kids going trick or treating and they're like going to like disappear into someone's house that's what i originally remembered but y i don't actually quite remember i think maybe like i don't know after hall we may be known as really wanting to go trick or treating anymore and we just kind of you know we have all these great costumes let's do something with them kind of thing like kathleen and to list said we kind of based the idea off of the hollowing costumes and we just thought well we didn't really do any green screens so we just kind of thought we thought that the school was a nice place and what would happen if monsters and   and actually interacted with each other so our regional player would have been a lot like a lot of other movies for films that other people as seen before so the idea was slightly boring compared to all of those because it's kind of like copyrighting so this idea for a film was different plus it was a lot more fun to do because it wasn't all like sun it was just like we got to act out and have fun with our characters plus if you go around wearing a cool costume like bacon or elvis presley i'm telling you it'll be a big hit at burbank  i think some of it is like you shouldn't judge people on the way they look because in the real world out there there has been a lot of racism and bigotry in these past few months and we kind of want to acknowledge that and like but do kind of like a funny thing on it you know with monsters and people and stuff people of different races and religions so yeah yeah i agree with that too less said and we just thought that you shouldn't judge of thought about well there's definitely a moral to saw one film and a film has to have a moral to it so we kind of thought about it monsters and humans are not alike but they still have a lot in call in common but they just don't look like each other so i know that a lot of people will look at racism and they won't they won't think it's right but they will really get their emad about it and after watching this film a lot of people end up feeling sympathetic for their people in this film but i think that the sympathy they were they were just like the humans right now and i think we need to treat everybody with respect in this film helped people notice that more than the normal world did or seemed to  do you know like you can't like just judge one person because it looked different  it was yeah it was like really fun shooting it because we were just laughing a lot when i know that it was supposed to be a more serious film because it does have a good moral to it but the best parts were not when it was all serious because then it made people quiet down in the room i think the best parts were probably when it was funny because it just made people so happy at the end of the day like park test really stinks so to be able to go to after school and have this workshop with something really funny to look forward to was great and i didn't just find it fun acting in those funny parts also just listening to them was really fun because i could laugh and it was just a lot of fun i think some my personal favorites were when bello was obviously doing her nothing b corndog song and shaking her hips is very funny and when it tilted down to see that she was standing on a stepstool very funny i also like to enjoy you know was like i went on a date with a lesson tomato yeah you know i thought it and how a very funny weird and serious experience it was yeah i agree and it is a really creative person he thought about a lot of this film and yeah he's in new zealand right now so you guys are lucky lucky day it's the last one name was so bad i can't even talk about i can't sleep every night since my mom got me a mess and it's so good before i couldn't sleep at all i'd just be in my bed like this but now it's a life saver i can sleep every day and so  the thank you all one more time for coming out tonight thank you panelists it was a really fun night watching film watching these films seeing the great work that we're doing after school and when you know a group gets together with a common vision some of