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Making a smile to die for Repulse students, teachers to unveil movie to community
Darrell Greer
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, June 5, 2013
REPULSE BAY
A film produced by students and staff at Tusarvik School is scheduled to be shown to the community free of charge at the school tonight.
Eric Nanorak and Michael Putulik, right, film a death scene for the locally-produced movie, A Smile To Die For, on the land near Repulse Bay this past month. - photo courtesy of Jeremy Chippett |
Teacher and school computer technician Jeremy Chippett said he and Jake Roberts have been teaching a technology class at the school.
He said one part of the class deals with film editing.
"What we've done is a fairly big cross-curricular project," said Chippett.
"The Grade 11 and 12 English classes wrote a script loosely based on the Inuit Mahaha legend that a student named, A Smile To Die For.
"The script was written in a type of sound and footage horror film, which we then took to add a bit in order to develop character.
"Then we took our tech class from 4 p.m. until 1:30 a.m. to shoot the movie."
The students spent about a month editing the movie and adding a soundtrack.
Chippett said the primary benefits to the students from a project such as this are learning new skills and the amount of work involved.
He said it's teaching skills, as opposed to traditional academic knowledge.
"There's a practical application to the skills we're teaching that the kids can use in other courses.
"We hope the project is something that can be built upon, but, unfortunately, my wife, Jennifer Perry, who wrote the script with the students, myself and Jake are all in our final semester here at the school and are leaving this month.
"This project has been about two years in the making, to get to this point, and it just so happened the project was finished just as we were preparing to leave.
"We hope we created some passion behind this which, hopefully, the kids can carry forward with whoever comes up here to take our positions."
Perry and Chippett taught at Tusarvik for seven years, while Roberts taught in Repulse for six.
Chippett said the group used some Alfred Hitchcock-type approaches to the film.
He said he also acted in the film, and he enjoyed doing the scene of him being pulled through the side of an iglu.
"There's another scene of a student who pokes his head into an iglu to talk to the people inside and then disappears.
"Less is more, in the Hitchcock style, and we had to use a lot of that approach.
"We had a blast doing this and some of the kids put in an unbelievable amount of work on the project.
"It's going to be great showing it to the community."
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