To celebrate the forthcoming publication of my new book Film in Action for DELTA Publishing in April, I’m going to share some activities from the book in a series of  posts over the coming weeks. Here’s the first.

This simple activity gets students thinking and talking about the multi-facteted and multi-modal nature of film and generates a huge amount of discussion and language with minimal teacher preparation.

I suggest you use a dramatic scene which has quite a lot of tension. Here’s a scene from American Beauty which works very well with this activity. However, the activity can be used with virtually any scene which has interaction between two or more characters.

Once you have selected your scene move onto the activity as outlined below:

If you try this activity with your students, do please let me know how it goes (in the Comments box below)!

Kieran