Lights, Camera, Action

How do we, as teachers, get students to understand that the different elements in videography – angling, movement, positioning of shots, voicing, selection of shots, etc. – generate certain meaning in establishing their personal identities?

To start off, I would pick a theme, for example advertisements. I will select a few products, such as, toys (possibly adverts from Toys R Us), cars (BMW, Mercedes), health supplements, washing detergent/powder, fast food restaurants (KFC, MacDonalds) and restaurants.

In every advertisement, there is a target audience. I will first get the students to identify the targeted audience for the various advertisements. After students have identified the audience, I would ask them to pay attention to the actor(s)/actress (es) in the advertisement and to make a link to their target audience. They have to justify their reasons. Another would be the role that each gender has to play. For example, it is usually the females who would be talking about a certain washing powder to wash the stains, such as mud, off from the males’ white t-shirt. Therefore, portraying that it is the females who are taking care of the household chores, whereas the males are ones who make a mess of things or are the ones who do sports.

I will then replay the advertisement again, asking students to focus at the camera angle. I would expect the students to identify that advertisements such as those of prestigious cars would have a higher angle as compared to those from toys and fast food restaurants. This is to give a high class image to the cars as we have to look up to people who own those cars.
Similar activities can be done to focus on the various aspects, such as the voices, background, context of culture, etc.

If time permits, the teacher can make this a project for students, to create their own short advertisement and justifying the various elements and their selection.