Assignment: Myth

This is part of a series suggesting different ways to use Moviestorm in schools or other educational environments. They also make useful exercises for film-makers wanting to develop and practice different film-making techniques. Many more lesson plans and ideas, with free downloadable resources, can be found on the Moviestorm Web site.

Assignment: Myth
Create a short film based on a popular myth or legend, or write your own myth.

This is a movie for a school project for a children’s literature class. The assignment was to make a parody incorporating different children’s tales.

Suggested techniques

You can do it in modern dress and setting if period dress and sets aren’t available.

Use a voiceover, or tell the whole story in dialogue. Consider framing the story by having someone relate it, and cutting from the narrator to the story.

Add music and a title sequence.

Try it the other way round: plan your myth in storyboard format, then make the animation, then finally write the myth, so the animation becomes part of the planning process.

For teachers: benefits to students

• This allows the student to visualise the story and bring it to life.
• By putting the story in a modern context, it encourages students to think about the moral aspect of it and extract that from the original setting, then see how that can be applied to their own lives.
• Using storyboarding techniques helps learners think of beginning-middle-and-end type planning.
• This fits with part of the UK National Strategy http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/19065

Suitability

• Ages 8+
• Suitable for groups
• Literature