For the last week I have been teaching a course in documentary film making for a program called Climate Quest at the University of Washington.

The goal is to take groups of high school students from all over Washington State through the process of preproduction, filming and post production, and help them make compelling short films about climate change.

It has been challenging and rewarding to take a group of people who have never used video equipment or video editing software and guide them through the thought process required to make a coherent documentary.

We start with storytelling and film theory and go right into interviewing technique, camera operation and most importantly, storyboarding.

The last few days are spent filming interviews with leading climate change scientists at the University of Washington, filming on location at the Cedar River Watershed (which is a delicate habitat that supplies the majority of drinking water for the greater Seattle area), and finally editing.

We are not yet to the editing stage (it will start tomorrow), but I can say that I have seen these students go from being somewhat timid amateur film makers to being confident film makers, interviewing Nobel Prize winning climatologists, paleontologists, and supercomputer climate model experts.

They have learned to ask important questions, set up wireless mics, use the rule of thirds to compose a frame and to plan ahead and answer the question of ‘so what?’ in their pre-production storyboarding.

I am really looking forward to sharing their final pieces later this month.

-Kirk

ps. the last photo is from my iPhone