A hands-on lesson in movie magic for parents. This was a really fun snowy Saturday project. We were trying to show our 4-year-old son how movies are made in order to help him fully understand that they are make-believe. Beginning to (almost the) end, he got to be involved.

1. The story: mama taped 2 Wii lightsaber controller covers together so the kiddo could pretend to be Darth Maul. He wanted to have a duel with Yoda.

2. The storyboard: The kiddo and I sat down and drew up a storyboard on 2 sheets of printer paper. We got practice drawing shapes, counting the number of scenes, coloring, and thinking through an imaginary storyline, etc.

3.Costumes: this was easy…the munchkin came up with the outfit the day before. Note the accuracy.

4. Production: I told him I was the director/camera man and he was the actor. We talked about these and other movie production jobs. We shot the whole thing on the phone in about 45 minutes. Thanks to the storyboard, we were able to practice and shoot each scene in a single take (with double takes on the death scene where he fell ON Yoda…this almost made it into the movie, but we wanted to follow the storyboard). Yoda was a prima donna and required multiple takes.

5. Post production: We watched the raw clips and talked about how we could edit them together to make it look like he was really fighting Yoda. We (aka, Dad) just did a quick edit on the iPhone using the Splice app. The music was from the Splice store…the movie exports from Splice to the photo albums, which has the option to upload to YouTube. Pretty easy. When it works.

Showing this to him, especially with the violent “death scene” is helping him to understand that people aren’t really hurting each other in movies.

Total time commitment, including editing, was about 4 hours. Worth every minute.

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