Short Films / Big Ideas - Tropfest Edition

This week we're looking at some of the finalists from Tropfest - Australia's very own annual celebration of short film making, that bills itself as the world's biggest short film festival. Unlike previous weeks where we have focused on strategies to get students thinking about, discussing and writing on ideas in the films they have watched, in this post we are encouraging you to invite students to evaluate and pass judgement on the films they have watched. In short, you can watch through the films short listed for Tropfest's best short award, and ask students to pick out the one they thought best. All this year's Tropfest's finalists can be watched at the festival's Youtube channel here.

We don't recommend that you watch through all of them, but we do recommend that you watch through some of our favourites:

*Silencer

*The Applicant

*Animal Beatbox

Before you watch through the films, you can discuss what makes a good film - and what makes a good short film. After you watch them, students can share their responses to each film in terms of how they evaluate its quality. You could do this several ways - by making a heading for each film on the classroom's whiteboard, giving each student three post-it-notes, and asking them to share an evaluation about each film by writing a comment and sticking it under each heading. Alternatively, if you tuned into last week's web 2.0 post, you could use a virtual sticky board to do this activity - Wall  Wisher.

As students discuss and make comments about the films, ask them to rank them in terms of quality. Once they have done this, you can tell them that the winner was Animal Beatbox - it will be interesting to see if students had this as their first choice, and how they respond to it being the winner if they didn't (here at Ticking Mind we find Animal Beatbox annoying rather than interesting).

Finally, students can actually write up a review of all three films.

In our next post, we'll be looking at same great short films that have come out of another Australian short film festival - ACMI's Little Big Shots that has been screening this week.