Activity 1 – Using Music to Imagine Film Scenarios

​

​

People often think that they are not creative, but we all are, and activites like these never fail to unlock original ideas in students‘ minds.

​

1. You need to choose a piece of music to play your students. It should be something that is not famous, something that they will not know. Ideally, it should be evocative of a certain atmosphere.

 

Note: There is plenty of non-copyright music on youtube you can use, if you put in ‚Royalty Free music – (e.g.) Suspense‘. Two pieces, one suspenseful, one upbeat, are linked here at the bottom of this description.

 

2. Play the music to your students once. Make sure they do not see a title of any kind to give them preconceptions – Scary music, etc. Tell them to just listen to it. Fade it out after about a minute.

 

3. Tell them you are going to play the music again. They should not write anything or take notes, just listen. But this time they should imagine that the music is the soundtrack to a film and they should try to imagine what is happening in that film. Again, fade out after about a minute.

 

4. Play the music one more time, for longer this time, and tell them that they can now take notes for themselves and describe in a bit of detail what is happening in that film.

 

5. Now the students have original stories that they are ready to tell and you have to decide what you want to happen next. They could tell eachother their stories in rooms, or write them up for homework, or (my favourite) do a speed writing activity where they have five minutes to write as much as they can. Or ……. you tell me.

 

See a video of the activity here

​

I am still struggling with technology that is new to me and the quality of the videos is very far from great. I think it is enough to demostrate the activity clearly though. More activities are being prepared and will be published here soon.

​

Download this description as a word file 

​

Possible music for the activity         

​