Dragon Cereal : The Movie

So if you've been keeping up, you know that James had a project to work on during the holidays, a book report in the form of a box of cereal. And he came up with this really cute idea called "Dragon Claws".

So he sat down at the computer and used Word to draw up the design, and then printed it out and showed it to us; and then we had him go back and make a few spelling corrections and little tweaks, so he did those and then he printed it out again and taped it to the cereal box. And then we all stood around and looked at it, and it looked really cool.

Nicely done, I thought. Looks great, I said.

Then, of course, he dropped The Bomb.

The cereal needs a "commercial". This is a fancy way of saying that the book report is actually an oral report, and the box is just a prop. But he'd spent the majority of his time designing and building the box, leaving very little time for the oral part of the presentation.

He wanted to make it a video commercial, one he could give to the teacher as a DVD. That sure beats standing up in front of the classroom with your knees knocking. Great for people who tend towards stage fright.

He turned in the "prop" on Friday, right on schedule. The report was due on Monday. Which left Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday to get it done.

Friday night was out. That was our church-sponsored AirSoft war, which kept him out until late.

So on Saturday, it was time for him to buckle down and write a script so we could start filming something.

Took quite awhile to get the message the way he wanted. By the time he finished, in fact, it was too late in the evening to start the project, so we put it off one more day. Til Sunday.

At this point, there was no more time. We had to get down to business. We cleared off the kitchen island, put the props in place, set up the camera, and started working.

Got the basic filming done, then took the raw footage downstairs to the video workstation and started editing. Didn't have quite enough time to get it done the way I'd hoped, but it was good enough for a first effort.

Here 'tis!



Addendum
He took the DVD in to school on Monday. The teacher was out. He took the video in again on Tuesday. She was still out. He took it in again on Wednesday - she was there! So he got to play it for everyone, and they all thought it was hilarious. {You know how 6th graders can be.} And the teacher asked for a copy!