Entrants from last year’s Little Lunch App Competition shared their best tips for using the app in our recent online workshop for teachers.

Primary teachers Amy Gartside (Wooloowin State School, NSW) and Laura Cumming (Woolsthorpe Primary School, Victoria) helpfully provided advice to entrants in this year’s Little Lunch App competition.

Some of Amy and Laura’s top tips for before filming are:

• Send home permission notes – feel free to copy and paste the details from our competition page to provide parents with enough details
• Get together with some colleagues to make an example video to share with students
• Give students time to play around with the app first so they can learn about the features through trial and error
• Students may like to research and experiment with different camera angles
• When brainstorming story ideas, students might like to reflect on stories from their own school lives, such as funny situations, school events or popular recess games.

And for during filming:

• If students are familiar with any particular filmmaking app, they may like to rehearse their ideas using that software and then refine scenes to shoot with the Little Lunch App
• Be sure students are aware of the option to set scenes in the past of present – this is useful for building flashbacks into their stories
• For the best sound quality, students should: stay in close range to the people they’re filming; avoid filming in the wind; and ensure that their hands aren’t covering the microphone when filming
• If the sound quality is poor, students may like to use the voiceover function to record dialogue over a pre-recorded scene
• Students should film with the sun behind them where possible, rather than facing into the sun.

Do you have any additional tips for teachers and students entering this year’s Little Lunch App Competition? We’d love to hear from you!

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