A director will help you get organized if you want to do a play. Lots of people work to put on a play or videotape a drama. There is the playwright and the cast all of the actors. There are the set and costume designers, and the crew members, those who collect or make all the things needed to put on the play. If you are making a video there is a camera person.

So many cast and crew members need someone to help them be organized and to work together. This person is the director. The director gets to cast the show and to decide who does what job to make the show run. The director helps the cast and crew make decisions about how to do the play. Often, at school, the director is your teacher. After you’ve done a number of plays perhaps one of the kids can be the director!

Editing your video

If you videotape your play, it is possible to rehearse the play, then perform the play on and video tape it at the same time. But it is also possible to videotape the play more like the professionals do, breaking the play into mini scenes and then taping the scenes more than once. This way you can edit, cut out the parts you don’t like and keep the best parts! This is just like editing a paper you have written. When you edit your play, you will be more certain the audience sees your best work.

We use a digital camera and the iMovie program for a Mac computer. We videotape a mini scene at least twice, more if we think we can make it better. If possible, we use two cameras. This way we can get the scene from two different angles – or get one close up tape and one from a distance.

Then, with the help of a teacher or parent, we transfer the video to the computer. We decide what we like best. What we’ve found easiest is to “Split Video Clip at Playhead” at the beginning of the bit we like, then at the end of what we want to keep. Then we just delete the bits that we don’t want to use.

Finally we add titles and transitions. Sometimes we find that putting a title between scenes in a drama will help us let the audience know that time has elapsed or that the scene has changed.

We found a couple of iMovie instruction manuals that were really helpful.

      

Copyright © 2002 by Arizona State University and the Arizona Board of Regents.