But to date there hasn’t been a primary school film festival anywhere on the north coast – until now.

Next Wednesday night (October 26) Forster Public School will host its first film festival at Club Forster’s auditorium.

Friends and family are invited to view the superb collection of films made entirely by primary school students.

The teaching staff were involved in four hours of professional learning around filmmaking using iPads, before this was introduced to the students.

Each class has made at least one movie.

Some older students have submitted a number of entries, as they were more independent and could work in small groups. 

Making movies is such an engaging, fun and exciting activity for the students.

They loved every minute of it.

“It builds such a sense of achievement and ownership when the students finally see the hours of hard work pay off in a final cut,” one student said.

Visual literacy is such an essential part of the students’ learning.

Schools today need to equip children for living in the 21st century.

The school’s English syllabus is designed to teach students to be critical thinkers and logical problem solvers which is essential today with the amount of information surrounding us in many forms.

Movie making is a project that involves so much critical thinking and logical problem solving.

These skills assist young people to learn to manipulate the large amount of advertising via technology which is so evident in today’s world.

Making a class film is quite a long process and it all begins with choosing an idea or storyline.

Some classes did film clips to popular songs or talent shows with a mixture of items, while other classes used a well-known children’s book, poem or dreamtime story as their starting point or came up with an original script of their own.

The students then had to decide if they wanted to film a stop motion movie or a live action movie.

As part of the process, the students created their backgrounds and stop motion sets, wrote their stories and scripts and storyboarded their ideas.

Some students had to learn lines and work hard on their acting skills, and others were in charge of operating the camera and microphone, or editing the final cut.

The school finished the project with 41 quality movies, which  will be showcased next Wednesday’s special night.

The school believes everyone will be stunned by the high standard of the movies submitted by our classes.

Remember, most teachers and students have had no prior experience in doing anything like this before and yet both teachers and students embraced this project and the results have been amazing.

 Farmer’s Patch is donating a hamper which we will raffle on the night, while trophies will be presented to classes for certain categories.

The school hoping the film festival may be the start of an even bigger concern in the future with other schools joining the project to give their students opportunities to work with technology and visual literacy.