For over ten years now, the Education Department has been helping the TREK program at Prince of Wales Secondary produce environmentally themed PSA’s and short videos. TREK is an outdoor education program that teaches about the natural environment and sustainability through lots of hands on experience, and at the end of their year, the students sum up all their newfound knowledge by making a short video. It’s a fun and positive way for them to share their thoughts from the term.
We enjoyed, as always, getting to work with all of the enthusiastic students and helping to push their ideas and skills to a higher level. We really strive to encourage them to make the best work they can, as we know how difficult producing original content in a media saturated world can be. We especially find that it can be difficult for students to engage with ideas about the environment and sustainability for a number of reasons. For one, the topics are incredibly huge and it can seem overwhelming to address it in a short video — it’s pretty hard to not only explain but to make your audience care about over consumption in less than a minute! Another stumbling block is that environmental issues are pretty hot topic right now (definitely not a bad thing!), and it can be hard for the students to find a unique way to express their voices, and that is a problem that plagues any filmmaking, not just about the environment.
We have a few strategies to help get students thinking beyond just parroting back the type of media they have already seen and get them working toward creating original, unique expressions of themselves. Because we face these challenges so often, we’ve decided to create a new aspect to our website: Every Picture Tells a Story. Our next post will be dedicated to our successful approaches in dealing with the challenge of creating unique work, so if you’re interested make sure to check it out!
In the end, despite all the challenges, the students all came up with unique, funny, and thoughtful ways to express their messages and we were thrilled with their progress throughout the week!
Thank you TREK for another great semester of making videos together!
