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Posts Tagged filmmaking


In just weeks the summer camp shenanigans of Digital Media Academy will be in full effect and I can’t wait. I love working with kids. Their imaginations and outlook on this world is so refreshing in comparison to the box most adults put their brains in. The summer camp course I’m most excited for is the Come Together: Music and Video Production Class I’ll be teaching this summer. I enjoy the fact that this course shakes your brain to think of everything from producing music and writing lyrics to shooting video and editing in Final Cut Pro. I’m especially excited to expand my instructor skill set from teaching this process in one day to one week. I think the students are going to have a ball and come up with some really creative projects. Here is one of my favorite projects produced in a day on the Lennon Bus in Fairhope, Alabama. It was during all the Swine Flu hype and the students on that day had their own angle on the hoopla. Check it out and be sure to register for the Come Together course HERE.

Even if you don’t know an Ollie from a McTwist or Gain from Shutter Speed, Digital Media Academy’s got teens covered this summer at Stanford. We’ve teamed up with leading local retailer SkateWorks and are raffling off a board AND free spot in our upcoming Skateboarding and Filmmaking Camp for Teens.

Digital Media Academy + SkateWorks

Or if you’re an experienced boarder and have made videos in the past, you’ll be able to kickflip your vids to an entirely new level. This year’s class at Stanford is taught by taught by SoCal’s visual fx and skateboarding master Nick Guth with UCSC grad and extreme sport junkie Travis Schalfman.

As with all our camps, you have the choice to get a taste of the college life by sleeping at Stanford’s campus each night or come for five action-filled days. Regardless, you’ll wrap the week with a dynamic vid … and there’s even a rumor the Skateworks Team will showcase their gravity-defying talents in an exclusive session for the class.

But if you’re not in the Bay Area this summer, there’s no need to despair. Digital Media Academy also offers the Skateboarding and Filmmaking Camp at UCLA, UCSD, George Washington University and Harvard, while SkateWorks’ brand-name boards, decks, trucks, wheels, and apparel are available for shipment across the country from their website.

Classes are filling up, be sure to register for our raffle before June 18 !

 

 Technology and Sunshine Meet at San Diego Summer Camp

 By Arash Afshar

Imagine exploring cutting edge media technologies such as robotics, 3D modeling, animation, video production, game design, graphics and more from top rated instructors in beautiful San Diego. The Digital Media Academy Summer Camp at UCSD offers students this in a unique, one of a kind learning experience!

Through the UCSD Summer Camp, your child will not only have an educational summer, but also get to explore the outdoors in very non-traditional ways.

Skateboarding and Filmmaking is a weeklong summer camp at UCSD which combines an interest in film making along with the excitement of skateboarding!  Teens enrolled in this camp will have the opportunity to receive skateboarding instruction from experts, and film all the action.  Students will also learn editing and special effects skills when they take their skateboarding video into a state of the art classroom studio for post production.

For teens and kids who would rather spend time on the beautiful San Diego beaches, the Digital Media Academy offers a Surfing and Filmmaking summer camp at UCSD.  In partnership with La Jolla Surf Camp, parent company of Surf Divas, students will have the opportunity to improve their surfing skills while filming and editing their own video!

These are only two of the many fun opportunities students have at the UCSD summer camp.  For more information on these programs and more visit: summer camp information.

There are many reasons why year after year, students return to the Digital Media Academy summer camps. Fun classes, experienced professors, and the chance to make life-long friends are just a few of them!  Register for summer camp today and see for yourself!

By Michelle OGrady

Summer is fast approaching and in sunny Los Angeles that means more time to do the things your kids love. Digital Media Academy courses at UCLA provide the perfect mixture of fun and education! Families looking for a summer sleepaway residential camp in California love the University of California (UCLA) American summer camp experience!

The addition of some great new teen programs such as our Action Sports & Media Combination courses allows our teen camp participants to enjoy skateboarding while learning practical skills in filmmaking. Digital Media Academy’s Action Sports Filmmaking and Skate Boarding and Filmmaking at UCLA will also give your child the leg up in today’s competitive job market!

With the ever-growing industry in Action Sports in Southern California, Digital Media Academy at UCLA will be able to provide an advantage to anyone who is thinking of pursuing a career in that field. It’s a great way to get started on your new career choice using some of the hottest technologies. Students will be able to learn cutting edge cinematography techniques and editing footage that your teen films while they visit a real life action sports event.

Register for this or explore any of the other great courses here:  UCLA Summer Camps

ucsd_surfThis summer the Digital Media Academy is proud to announce another exciting sports action course – surfing and filmmaking! Held only at UC San Diego, this new course is offered in partnership with La Jolla Surf Academy, based in La Jolla, CA. In this “hybrid” course, students spend the morning gaining new or improving surfing skills, under the guidance of certified instructors of the La Jolla Surf Academy. In the afternoon, students return to the UC San Diego campus and to DMA’s studio classroom to view and edit video footage taken earlier in the day or week. By the end of the week, students go home with their very own surf video – uniquely edited by each student!

The first “pilot” of this course, taught San Diego native Chris Owen, was held the week of July 13-17 with six students and was deemed a huge success by all! Some of the students who took the course had surfed before, but a few had not. One student who wasn’t naturally enthusiastic about surfing felt confident and excited about surfing by the end of the week. As his mom commented, “David didn’t want to learn to surf before he started the class. The idea of making a movie of his adventure kept him motivated, and now he loves surfing!”

To see one student’s surf video, click below:
DMA Surfing and Filmmaking

Surfing and Filmmaking, for both teens (ages 13-17) and Adventures students (ages 9-13), is being offered again the week of August 3-7 at UC San Diego. For more information and to register, call 866-656-3342.

We are now in our third week of summer 2009! As of this week, we have four locations up and running across the country, including Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, UCLA and The University of Texas at Austin. The University of California at Irvine ran for two weeks, June 22 – July 3, focusing on filmmaking courses for both teens and adults. Next week, four more locations will be launched, including Brown University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego (UCSD) and our first ever international location, The University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

DMA students include adults, teens and kids as young as seven years old. At each age group, a variety of courses are offered, including movie making, video game creation, robotics, animation and web design. Summer 2009 also features several new courses, including Adventures in Cartoon and Comic Creation for kids ages 9-13 and Junior Adventures in Digital Art and Movie Making for kids ages 7-9. Among our new teen courses is the very popular Music and Video Production course, taught in conjunction with the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus. Students in this class use the latest audio, video and music gear to create their own songs and music videos! Stay tuned for more features on each of these new courses!

All DMA courses are project based, so students are going home every Friday with their very own portfolio of project work. In the coming weeks, we will feature many of these projects, as well as profile some of the students whose creativity is filling college campuses nationwide!

All courses are taught by professionals with classroom teaching experience and/or experience in the industry, so students are learning from the “masters” themselves! Please check out our instructor biographies to learn more about our teaching staff.

Spots are still available at several locations. Please call 866-656-3342 for course availability!

What do you do with 2 pre-teen girls during summer that is fun, challenging, not academic, yet a learning experience? You enroll them in Digital Media – Hands on filmmaking class, that’s what! My girls had a blast at the camp, they were not very eager to go on the first day, but from the second day on, they were getting up early and waiting to go to the camp. The entire experience of being at Stanford University, learning about different techniques in film editing and enhancing was excellent.

The teachers were great – kids learned about group participation, leadership, acting, script writing all in one class.  The kids had to make a 10 minute movie and an ad, had to come up with their own script, act, and edit their films. For my kids it was a real eye opener and got them to realize the effort behind movie making. I doubt if they will view movies the same way again. Who knows, maybe they might even pick it as a career.

Definitely worth the time and money invested!

Teens get the full film camp experience at Digital Media Academy summer camps and week-long courses.

Watch a movie created by teens in the Filmmaking course at University of Pennsylvania DMA camp this past summer. All teen students in the class played a part in writing the movie script, storyboard the movie scenes, acting in various shots around campus, filming with high quality cameras, directing the scenes, editing music for the video, and editing the video in Final Cut Pro on their own Apple computer.

This video is just one example of the creative movies that are created by teens at Digital Media Academy’s summer film camps. Enjoy the suspense-filled movie a group of DMA film students made entitled… “Re-Encountered”

All summer camp courses for teens

My name is Matthew Levie, and I’ll be teaching Documentary Filmmaking again this summer. I’m a professional editor, and feel free to browse my web site to see what I do.

Last year’s Documentary Filmmaking class was a fantastic experience for me as a teacher. The students included:

• a businesswoman from Boston,
• a sociologist from Japan,
• a teenager from France,
• a flight attendant from Miami,
• a scientist from Texas,
• and a teacher from South Carolina

Imagine what you could learn from a group like that!

Here’s a small snippet from the course. Since I’m an editor I can’t resist an example of phenomenal documentary editing. Have a look at the following clip, from the documentary Carrier, about the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

So first, one of the pilots introduces the idea that everybody on the carrier needs to do their job correctly, at the right time, for the carrier to function properly. And that sets off this montage of flight deck operations, set to—wait, can it be?—the “March of the Wooden Soldiers” from Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker.”

Notice how similar motions are grouped together—there’s a beautiful series of circular motions, for instance. And at the end, somebody declares “it’s like a ballet.” Which makes perfect sense, since the filmmakers have already make that perfectly clear from a visual standpoint! But then they extend the metaphor to other areas of the ship, particularly the people feeding the ship and cleaning it up.

This is actually an important priority of the filmmakers: making the viewers understand that an aircraft carrier isn’t all about the planes and the flight deck, but that there are people greasing the cables and cleaning the toilets as well. And they’ve done a great job of conveying that visually at every opportunity.

Want more? Well, you’ll have to come to Stanford. Not a lot of people regret spending a week in Northern California, and I’m sure you’ll learn a tremendous amount and enjoy yourself as well!

Browse the Documentary Film class syllabus here.

See what teens made at Digital Media Academy film camp this summer in Chicago!

This video was made by shooting hundreds of individual JPEG photos and piecing/editing them together in Final Cut Pro. This was made during DMA Film Camp in Chicago this past summer in the Teen Film Editing and  Filmmaking Course. Learn how to make a movie like this at a DMA course this summer!


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