North Hollywood High Career Day

North Hollywood High School held their Career Day on June 5th and invited me to take part. I had two class periods, each about an hour long. It was just enough time to run through an accelerated version of the ‘Shooting the Scene’ exercise at the center of our Five Day DVD Workshop.

Each class was split into two groups. We only had one camera so one group shot while the other had a brief Q&A. It was their day to ask questions about careers, so they all had lots of great questions about what it was like to work as a filmmaker, editor, director, videographer and so on. Then they switched and the second group shot and the first group asked questions. Each group had only fifteen minutes to shoot, but they all completed their scenes – some with time to spare. With the remaining time, we had a screening and discussed their work.

In an hour, each class completed two short films, had a screening and a great discussion about shooting and editing technique. In between all of that, they hopefully got some useful information about working in the film industry.