Last week, the Shutterstock office in NYC celebrated “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” with food, arts and crafts, balloons, and plenty of other activities — including special workshops that taught the kids the basics of engineering, food photography, and our personal favorite: filmmaking. During the two-hour film workshop, we discussed jobs in film production, as well as the different steps of the filmmaking process. Each child then chose a job, either in production or as an actor, to help film a re-created classic cinema scene.
Once jobs were assigned we went over the script — an adapted version of the court-room scene from A Few Good Men. In pre-production, the young director (Aidan Crowe) worked with his actors (Annabelle Thurston, Kai Ovalle, Mosiah Graham-Nelson, Mika Roque, and Critter Manley) to get the performances he wanted. The art department (Hannah Kovach and Isabella Cuijpers) scoured the office in search of props and set decorations, and cleverly forged a gavel out of a balloon. Meanwhile, the camera and sound team (Iggy Roque and Aahan Kapur) learned how to use the high-tech equipment.
Finally, it was time to start filming! Hannah made sure the scene was set, Aahan began to record sound, Iggy rolled the camera, Annabelle, Critter, Kai, Mosiah, and Mika all took deep breaths and got into character, and Aidan confidently called “Action!” The next hour was a mix of stress and hard work coupled with lots of fun and camaraderie. When filming wrapped, the kids went downstairs and got some well-deserved donuts, while we quickly edited the footage together. You can see the final product above — something each one of these young filmmakers should be extremely proud of!