The #VEGASSTRONG Documentary
On October 1st, 2017, Las Vegas experienced the worst mass shooting in modern America at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. 58 people were killed and over 800 injured during the shooting. Two survivors would succumb to their wounds in the following years. My students and I felt compelled to help the community heal and decided to make a short documentary about the first responders of Las Vegas, who helped save countless lives that night. After the first interview, we already knew this was much bigger than a short film, and we spent the next three years filming interviews, often on Zoom due to Covid-19, as well as watching and cataloguing over a thousand hours of the Las Vegas Metro Police bodycam footage from that night. We finished the film in August 2021 and are now awaiting word from film festivals as well as having a private screening for the first responders of Las Vegas.
The Historical Chair Project:
Students in 9th grade were tasked with researching, designing, and building a functional chair for a historical patron. They chose a historical figure, research them and their world, and then designed and built a functioning wooden chair using design thinking and woodworking tools. It was a great blend of the humanities and STEM subjects that taught real-world skills and application.
The Mt. Charleston Conservation Project:
Students who started a UAV (drone) club were given the opportunity to take on a monumental project, which was to help support local efforts in forest and ecosystem conservation in the Mt. Charleston Recreational area, a local mountain and forest outside of Las Vegas, NV. Students documented the negative effects of soil poisoning by salt from the roads, as well as the impact of a dramatic increase in population and traffic on the mountain. Students used 4K cameras and UAVs to photograph and film, worked with a local professor at UNLV to carefully test and document the scientific data to show the negative impact on the environment, and presented a short documentary to raise awareness and demonstrate the need for change to the local community. The documentary won Best Nevada Filmmaker at the Dam Short Film Festival, screened at the Yale Environmental Film Festival and the Greater Lehigh Valley Film Festival, and best of all contributed to the campaign that helped bring change through a reduction of salt use on the mountain.
The Multicultural Cooking Show:
This project involved five teachers and over one hundred students from three schools in the United States and Hungary all working together to investigate family recipes saved during the Holocaust, research their own family recipes, and creating a cooking show of recipes that helps bring understanding of family and foreign cooking habits to light.
The Butterfly Project:
This project started with students reading Hannah Gofrit's I Wanted to Fly Like a Butterfly. After some discussion, my photography students and all of the sixth grade students at my school used Adobe Photoshop and their photography skills to respond to Hannah's experiences through art. Once done, twenty five of the works of art were sent to Thessaloniki, Greece, to be printed on canvas and hung as part of a museum exhibit to remember the Holocaust and the toll it took in Greece and elsewhere.
Israel’s 70 Year Anniversary Windows Project:
Students were asked to research, design, and built windows that captured an aspect of Israel’s 70 year history. They were asked to interpret the concept of a window and design a piece that would help tell the story of Israel. Their finished windows were then put on display at the Venetian hotel and casino during the IAC’s 70th anniversary celebration.
Character Visual Analysis Project:
I brought this project idea back from AdobeMAX 2015, and it evolved into a fun, dynamic way for English and History teachers to assess their students when reading Shakespeare or studying philosophers. It involves students identifying character traits of a Shakespearean character or philosopher, and then bringing multiple images, researched and downloaded from Creative Commons (CC) sources, into Adobe Photoshop and blending them behind a silhouette to produce an engaging exercise in critical thinking and aesthetics.
Student Photography
Using Canon, Nikon, Panasonic and Fuji cameras, many lights and backgrounds, and Adobe Creative Cloud, my students develop their photographic and editing skills through a project-based curriculum that has them explore the principles, skills and genres of photography by creating their own projects based on their own interests. By investing the time to learn Adobe Lightroom, Bridge, and Photoshop, the students are able to process and manipulate their images and bring out the full potential of their photographs as well as communicate in strong and impactful ways through a visual medium.
Student Video Production
Using Adobe Creative Cloud software, including Premiere Pro, Audition, After Effects and Photoshop, my students create a variety of videos based on student-initiated projects. From animations to short films, their passions and creativity are turned loose through the innovative Adobe workflow. This has allowed me to concentrate on skill building, both the hard skills of camera, lights, sound and editing and the soft skills of interview, writing and storytelling that students of the 21st Century need.
APPLE ADS
ANIMATED FILMS
SHORT FILMS
MOOD FILM AND FILM REEL