— Jonathan
]]>The film was made by a year 10 Physics class (average age 15). All of the class contributed in some way. Script was written by the team, with just a little checking from class teacher to check the Physics was OK.
]]> I’m convinced some teams deliberately torture me with the most obscure file formats they can find. If we gave out awards for that, this would be this year’s winner — the sound and pictures were playing back at different frame rates within the same file. First time I’ve seen that.Anyway. Fixed now. And I’m glad, because the film’s fun - it’s a shame it’s technically challenged, because it’s well-written and packs in a good chunk of material. Great effort.
— Jonathan
]]>Excellent performance, clear explanation, great script. Brilliant.
— Jonathan
]]>There’s a gag here about energy of performance, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Nice concept, some nice photography (the shot of the three particles/candidates sitting their exam about 50 seconds in is particularly good — trust me, that sort of thing is neither accidental nor easy). Decent effort.
— Jonathan
]]>Gravity.
Ah, we’re spotting a pattern here, right? Lots of these films with no notes are from the same school.
Sorry, took us a while to work out what was going on there.
]]> I like the way this starts. It’s very moody, almost ominous. Which makes the long pauses and scowls to camera all the more wonderful. Bizarre. I rather like it.— Jonathan
]]>Sound.
…most of which we’d got from the title, right?
]]> See, one of the things about printing the script out and holding it to the side of the camera is that your performers always steal glances. As a result, they look either shifty or utterly fed up.Which, to be honest, I think is quite funny. Especially when it’s good and short and includes giggling from behind the camera, as here.
— Jonathan
]]>Anyway — I love this. It covers a complex bit of engineering clearly, and it’s deeply silly. Sounds like a SciCast film to me!
— Jonathan
]]>…
NOTHING! Aw… sniff
]]> There are lots of things I like about SciCast, but it boils down to: you see films like this, and you know that a whole bunch of people have come together to make a film that’s completely… well, ridiculous. Gloriously so. But, you know — how many people do you know who write love songs about nuclear fusion in their spare time?It’s not a normal thing to do. I’m delighted we’ve given people an excuse to do things like this, I think the world’s a richer place for it.
Still ridiculous, though.
— Jonathan.
]]>No, it’s that this school has a completely different range of wigs to every other school we’ve seen on SciCast. Really, look around. Amazing.
]]>The Effects of Gravity.
Ridiculous. Great stuff.
— Jonathan
]]>]]> Golgi Ramsey and Flagella Lawson? Genius. I also love that they’re doing the Blue Peter thing of taking things out of the oven using gloves, then immediately showing that they’re not hot at all. Great stuff.Is it cookery or is it cell manufacture?
A huge amount of work here. Also: nuts. I wish we had clearer close-ups, but they’re packing so much in it can’t have been easy to pull all this together.
— Jonathan
]]>Gravity.
No, really, that’s all the notes they sent us!
]]> This is mad. I particularly love the trolley service.— Jonathan
]]>A well-constructed film, too. It’s only a shame that the sound is a bit ropey in places, making it hard to make out what’s being said. Great effort, though.
— Jonathan
]]>From Institute of Physics postcards.
Good clear camerawork, and I love that the demonstration is done in one shot. No cheating here! Great stuff.
Don’t drink the glass of water afterwards, though.
— Jonathan
]]>We decided to base our film on the ‘Mr Men’ books, using a simple storyline, bright colours and naming our characters after the terms they were representing and having them behave accordingly. We also introduced Mr Random, to act as a contrast to the three more serious characters and provide more opportunities for comedy. In order to provide an alternative analogy to the dart board usually used to explain these terms, we decided to have our characters playing golf. Mr Random refusing to stand up during the animation of his shot was an unexpected bonus.
Filming was fun but tedious as we had to do the smallest changes to get the smoothest animation possible. This was the reason why Hannah and Tessa got left to do most of it, and the final scene was done entirely by Hannah. To film the live action parts meant digging a hole in the field and hiding a sieve in a small pond. We were supervised; Hannah was filming and Tessa was the one with throwing the ball and had to keep fishing it out the dirty pond water! There are many outtakes because of people(Tessa) getting in the shot and the thrower(Tessa) missing the target or not getting the right angle of rebound. One of the best bits was filming the sounds. It was amazing to see how random objects can make unrelated sound. A golf ball hitting a gas canister is the sound of Mr Frog’s head! Putting the animation together itself was a much a challenge as the filming. We ended up doing it on Hannah’s laptop, in the school holidays, which didn’t like the fact that so many pictures were being used. We had to save after adding five new photos just in case it decided to crash, which happened many times. We also worked on the music (which took many tries to get perfect) at Hannah’s house.
Mr Frog himself, although the film is named after him, began his life with us playing with leftover plastercine after making the other characters, then got put into the film as an animal that Mr Random’s golf ball would always hit. We were trying to come up with the title for the film, we wanted to distance it from anything generally considered boring, and make it sound fun and interesting. Thus, we decided to name it after Mr Frog, as a comic, non-scientific character who we believe would help capture the interest of students who don’t enjoy or found it difficult, the general target audience for the film. And so Mr Frog went from having no real mention to the title character in a month. And we will not be begrudging him his day off tomorrow!
]]> This is a brilliant idea for tackling some complex ideas. Terrific notes, too. Great stuff.My only quibble is whether the use of a very specific measurement (‘is the ball in the hole, yes or no?’) may not be a great way of explaining the difference between accuracy and precision. Wikipedia is pretty good on this. The diagrams there are particularly helpful, as is this:
If an experiment contains a systematic error, then increasing the sample size generally increases precision but does not improve accuracy.
If Mr. Precise’s ball always hit exactly the same point in the bunker, and Mr. Accurate made it close to the hole but never actually in it, that might have made the distinction more clear, maybe? Useful subject for classroom discussions, though, and a great film for spurring those discussions.
— Jonathan
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