Film Terms 3: Revenge of the Vocabulary Words

I tell you what, Film class just isn't the same as Comics class. It doesn't have the same place in my heart. It doesn't inspire me to blog every day. But it is, in many ways, easier to teach. I don't have to start at the ground level and explain what the medium is and why they should give it a chance; they already like movies. And they have a basic idea of how movies work. So that part is refreshing.

This week we started on film history. You can't possibly understand an art form if you don't know its history, right? Right. Did you know that the first commercial exhibition of film took place in 1894? It did. Did you know that D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking film Birth of a Nation is unrelentingly racist? It is.

I also gave them their third and final set of introductory film vocabulary words this week. The quiz is tomorrow. See how many you can define.

1. prop

2. costume

3. edit

4. cut

5. fade-out/fade-in/dissolve

6. storyboard

7. take

8. mise-en-scene

9. montage

10. documentary