# French 40 Workshop
*By Ammara Vaid*

Students in French40, a class on French films, visited the Learning Lab to work on developing skills for their own filmmaking journeys and better understand the underlaying processes to the media that they consume.

*A French40 student posing in a study on lighting variation*

## Workshop Events

### Continuity Editing
Using a scene from the movie [*insert movie name here*] as an example of the power of continuity editing in establishing social connections, Marlon walked students through how this effect could be reproduced.

See his demo on continuity editing [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzRI03Ihi2Q).

### Lighting
Students in the class learnt about the power of lighting in creating a mood.

*How backlighting emphasises a figure:*

*How moving the key light alters the mood of the subject's environment:*


## Why It Matters
The skills developed during this workshop and honed in the work generated for their filmmaking project will stimulate students to move beyond being passive consumers of media to producers of media that are then able to thoughtfully and interrogatively observe it.
French40 is, of course, a language class and the skills that students are developing are seamlessly transferable to their French. In the words of Marlon, Director of the Learning Labs and this workshop’s facilitator: “in order for an individual to possess facility with a language, they must be able to produce the language in addition to being able to listen and understand it.”