Re: creativity

For me, creativity comes out of working within limitations; I consider 30-second spots and music vids to be like haiku poetry. Even in a 30-second spot, I think you can show a character and plot arc. My joy is to make the spot work and look good on as little money as possible; I got an award once for a spot that cost me like five bucks to make. I really don't know what I would do if I was ever given a "real" budget.

As far as your kids, I think you start them out small and limited, so they learn to create rather than just push a button or invoke a plug-in to solve a problem, and as has been said already, the real job is story telling, and the technology is only to support that story.

So take away the technology at first. Make them do flip-books.

Go back to first principles, try stacks of note cards, and teach the kids how to arrange and re-shuffle these cards to tell the same story in different ways. Go back to the birth of montage theory, re-do the experiments of Kuleshov and Pudovkin. Give them all one common pool of footage and assign them to make a sequence that's funny, then one that's dramatic, etc. all out of the same footage. Make them watch each other's work and see how many different takes they come up with on the same theme. Also point out where they all seem to think alike, and ask why.

Have them do five-minute radio plays with music and sound effects to evoke locations. Instruct them that anybody's play that uses the phrase: "Well, here we are in ___..." to establish a location gets an F for the exercise. Give them MOS footage and require them to supply all the dialog as well as room tone, background noises, foley, and music. Sound is under-appreciated in what we do, so make an extra effort to just do sound for a week. Have each kid invent a foley effect out of household materials, record it, and use it on something. Play them a sample of Albert Brooks doing Foley for a bad sci-fi picture sequence in his film:"Modern Romance".

Show a clip of MST3k and have a screening of some bad movie where the class makes the comments in the same manner.

Make them all use one common set, say an elevator, and do skits based around it.

Assign them to each do a five-minute film that must include one common prop, phrase, and sound effect used by all the entries.

Kids are natural experts at fighting and exploring limits, it is what they try to do every day, so let them put their energy into making the most out of a limited raw material. See how many things they can improv out of a simple everyday object. Give them modeling clay and ask them to use it to depict something subjective like an emotion.

Do 3-point lighting exercises but also have shadow-puppet contests at the same time.

None of this is expensive or technologically challenging, rather, that's the point; if you first learn to make something out of nothing, then when you get your hands on real resources, you will make much more out of them, because you can look at them in more and different ways of using them than just the obvious ones.