Wednesday, 17 April 2013

The Litter-Less Lunch Project!


 Last term two second year classes created a litter-less lunch campaign. We worked with professional film makers to devise a story board in small groups. The storyboard was to promote awareness of the effects of dropping litter.  The story board needed to show the consequences of dropping the litter and also needed a catchy slogan! The winning story board would be taken and made into a short advert and then would be entered into a competition against other schools. In class we looked at all of the story boards and scored them one to ten (one being the worst and ten being the best) on various attributes. We also got the eco team involved and asked them to choose their favourite, along with the teachers and Ms Jordan-our media expert.

It was decided that the winning story board was created by Billy, Dylan and Dale (2EN7) and a group of other second year pupils were chosen to take part in the filming of the advert. Their idea was: three friends are strolling through the woods; one of the girls drops a piece of litter and gets attacked by a tree!

We worked collaboratively with the professional film makers and spent the day filming in Roley’s wood. Working with film cameras and boom microphones helped to finish our film to the highest possible standard! Learning about white balance, focus, exposure and framing helped improve our knowledge of film techniques. The advert was prepared in three different stages, initially we learnt about the filming techniques, following that we began to film in Roley’s wood. It took a whole day but was definitely worth it! To finish, we began working with professional editing software and edited the advert to make it look professional! This would hopefully give us a good shot at winning the competition.

New bin stickers designed by Jonathan McVinnie
To promote our advert and to raise awareness we began a ‘missing’ campaign. The girl who had been attacked by the tree in the advert was now declared missing so we made posters and news reports to go up around the school. The film has now been shown to all the pupils to bring together the whole campaign and the anti-litter drive!

If we win the competition, our advert will be made to a professional standard and used in anti-litter work throughout the year in many different domains across Edinburgh. How exciting! There is also a viewing of the adverts for all schools involved at the Filmhouse, so we even get a taster of the successes film-makers have too.

We have really enjoyed this experience and would love to have an opportunity like this again. Thank you to all the people who made it possible as we have learnt some great skills for later in life! It has definitely opened our eyes to the different possible careers out there and it’s great to think that we’ve done our bit for the planet at the same time.

Fin Rutherford (2K1) and Eilidh Grubb (2K2)

To watch the film made by the S2 pupils check out http://vimeo.com/63733518