One of my IB Film students who is working on her video portfolio for college found this great font called Steel Tongs. As you can see, it quickly creates production credits that you can use for generating professional looking movie posters or title sequences. If you haven't found this site yet, there are lots of great fonts to be found at dafont. Thanks Cailin!

Hey photography teachers, have we got the project for you!

Matt Cautheron, Mike Skocko, and myself have put together Paint the World With Light: an international light painting extravaganza.

The idea is simple: wherever you and your students are, use light painting to tell a story about where you live, or reveal something magical about where you live. We'll compile your images from as many communities from around the world as we receive.

Image by Jan Wöllert and Jörg Miedza

Please welcome to the world my very own little revolutionary, Amaya Zoey.

Rama Hughes recently posted about the portrait party that my foundations class shared with Melissa Woodland's class from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania last year. I had posted the drawings that my students had done, but just realized that I never posted the results that we received back a few weeks later (it was the end of the year and things get so busy).

As mentioned in the last post, our students recently returned from the farthest reaches of the Middle Kingdom, armed with nothing but their cameras and their wits about them*.

I just got one of the best photography tips ever from a student in class today.

Our students came back last week from our "China Alive" field trips. The 9th and 10th grades travel in groups to various locations around China. I gave my students a 'photography scavenger hunt' to do on their journeys. Today was our critique, and one of my students came back with this shot:


I asked him how he got the shot- he has his own DSLR camera, but didn't have a Macro lens, as far as I knew.

If an elephant makes it, is it art?



Its hard to know what exactly is happening here. Clearly the elephants are painting. Are they receiving instructions from their keepers in the form of taps or whispers? Do they have a code that is used to suggest 'line' or 'dab'? Or are they actually painting something that they were taught?

Watching the elephants play, bathe, eat, and interact with people at The Maesa Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand, makes one thing remarkable clear; they are loving, gentle, and sharp as tacks. Watching them paint though, is truly extraordinary.

Here are some photos of the elephants painting, and some elephant paintings:

My IB Film Year 2 students are brainstorming their final narrative project. We scrapped our original idea- sometimes that's part of the process. I was looking online this morning for some new inspirational short films to show them. This is perhaps one of the best short films I've seen in years- it's fun, its well shot, its clever, and its simple.

I'll be showing it to my IB Film class next week. Kurt Kuenne's Validation: