School Art Week with Written On Wood Project
"Be Brave. Art means creating things that didn't exist". - Art Week 2022, Chinese International School (CIS)"
We were delighted to launch our Written On Wood Filmmaking Project as part of CIS Art Week. Filmmaking with students is a great project-based learning opportunity that is highly collaborative and requires different skillsets. In this project, we incorporated filmmaking with elements of Hong Kong's history, sociology, geography, ecology, arts and humanities to enrich learning potential for student participants. Students were highly engaged in this week-long, hand-on learning experience.
At the beginning of the week we challenged three groups of students to produce three short films that would lead audiences on a journey of thoughts, feelings and emotions through three compelling stories.
The three groups of students were challenged to tell their stories from different perspectives - one each from historical, biographical, and environmental and ecological perspective. They were encouraged to tell the stories by leveraging creative techniques such as illustration, animation, and voice-over. The students became deeply invested in their films and showed a high level of commitment to teamwork. We were impressed by their level of autonomy and how they took control over their learning process, showing intrinsic motivation to make the best film possible within such a short period of time.
We are proud of the three films our student participants accomplished and are actively seeking support to produce a full-length documentary from the historical perspective by professionals. We aim for the final film to be a meaningful and child-friendly documentary that can help a wider cohort of Hong Kong students learn about the history and the changes of their homeland. We hope that the documentary will inspire more students to explore their thoughts, feelings and emotions about Hong Kong in a new way. (View the 7-Minute video trailer here).
