The Place Of Digital Video Editing in Learning

CHAPTER THREE - How can video editing help to support creativity in writing?

Nikkie Huddart South Dartmoor Community College

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between creativity in writing and editing video. By its very nature, creativity is difficult to define. ON one level the word has an almost mystical quality. “Good” writers are gifted with creativity. ON the other hand, English teaschers are faced with the necessity of bottling this elusive quality and uncovering it in every student in the English classroom. In an essay on “School Students’ Writing”, Michael Rosen the “vexed word creativity”. He writes that we understand creativity as that which is “really ‘original’, or conversely ‘old hat’ .“ However, he also points towards another definition of creative as that “which is transformative for the writer”. Creativity happens when we, as writers, learn through our writing; when we can reflect as we write and change in the process. Paddy Creber suggests that writing can be creative when “ a productive inner dialogue is set up between ourselves as writers and ourselves as readers….This is what is meant by writing being a reflexive medium which is self-generating.”

A similar process can be said to happen in video editing. Editing is a reflexive process by nature, requiring students to watch, edit, watch and reflect. Through editing, the raw material they begin with changes into a new text. They create new meanings and make discoveries about their work. The choices and decisions made in production and post-production can be confirmed or reassessed. Non-linear editing technology also allows for playfulness and experimentation without losing work – a bugbear of the old analogue systems.

Video editing can offer opportunities for lower ability students where writing has often failed them. With these students it is production of any writing, regardless of whether it can be considered creative, that is the problem. The process of putting their thoughts into words and writing them down restricts their creativity. Creber points out that “However one views it, writing is neither natural nor easy.” He goes on to say that, ”less able pupils learn also that writing is difficult; that they are not much good at it; that evaluation is the teacher’s mythical prerogative.” If students know that they struggle with writing but cannot understand what is “not much good” about it, it seems unlikely that they will reach the transformative place Rosen writes of.

However, if through editing, these students are given the opportunity to shape narrative, to play and explore without the anxiety they often bring to writing in English lessons, it is possible that they may be able to see what they can achieve. It is also possible that they would be able to take that knowledge and confidence back to their own writing.

SECTION ONE - CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

In Assessing Achievement in the Arts, the authors stress the importance of process rather than product. Often, in an educational context, the emphasis is necessarily placed on the external outcome of an activity in order to assess students’ achievement. This research is based on an idea of process. It posits the idea that digital editing may help students who experience difficulties in structuring their written work. It explores the idea that, as digital editing enables students to instantly arrange and rearrange clips into different structures, it may be a useful tool to develop with students who lack these organisational skills. It is hoped that, through observations of, and discussions with students involved in the research, it may be possible to provide new frameworks for creative writing for students with these difficulties, which could be used in a classroom context.

Creativity for educational purposes has been defined by NACCCE (1999) as an, “Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value”. Students are required to engage with their own creativity in the English curriculum in many ways, including writing. Yet writing is a troublesome area for many students: creative writing in particular, where it may come with many preconceived ideas about “writing a story”. Paddy Creber writes that, “However one views it, writing is neither natural nor easy”; for some students, it is an experience that stifles, rather than encourages, creativity. If creativity should be on the curriculum for every student, then it is helpful to conceptualise it as something which can be accessible to all, something that is, as Mike Sharples argues in Writing as Creative Design, “an everyday activity.” The broader context of this study considers approaches to writing, how students can use different approaches in combination in order to access their own creativity and express that creative impulse in terms that an audience can understand.

As a theoretical starting point, this research borrows a framework for understanding writing from Mike Sharples. His ideas about Discoverer and Planner approaches to writing and the importance of constraints have particularly influenced the pattern of this research.

Using categories recently identified by several researchers, Sharples divides writers broadly into Discoverers and Planners. Sharples claims that, although many writers are convinced by one of these approaches, that they are not so much traits as approaches to writing. He points to the fact that although some writers are very grounded in one approach, others use them depending on what kind of text they are writing. This indicates that the methods can be taught. The two categories demand very different approaches. As implied by the name, Planners prepare and hone their ideas before they begin to write. Sharples writes that, “The plans guide composing and when there is a mismatch they either edit the text or revise the plan.”

By contrast, Discoverers are “driven by an engagement with the text.” Rather than plan, they plunge immediately into the writing of the text, revealing ideas to themselves as they write. For them, self-understanding arises from writing.” While Planners reflect and edit as they go, Discoverers tend to They rework their complete text many times, reading and revising until it “shapes up” to the constraints of the task and audience.

One of the key differences between the approaches is the relationship between writer and intended audience. Sharples writes that:

Discovery writing is, initially at least, a communication with oneself. Through the act of re-reading and revising, the writer gradually becomes an objective reader, separated from the original ideas, and can shape the text to the needs of an audience. A planning approach is, from the start, a communication with the external reader.

For the Discoverer to ensure that their text is appropriate for their intended reader, they must spend a long period of revision and reflection after their initial engagement with the writing of the text. Sharples claims that fiction writing is generally more suited to the Discovery method, as it “encourages longer periods of engagement”. Many students embrace this approach, especially in their creative writing, where they are often resistant to any form of planning. However, the danger of the Discovery approach is the tendency to “engage with the text for long periods of time, leaving no opportunity for monitoring or critical appraisal” (113). Students in an educational environment are almost always working within fairly narrow time constraints. If they do not complete their first draft, they may not reach the crucial reflective stage. They may not engage in “extensive revision” or have the time to rework. Consequently, the question of audience may remain unexplored, even overlooked.

Although the Discovery approach may be the obvious approach to creative writing, it may be valuable for the type of student outlined above to attempt the Planning approach. If students with a tendency to produce a “ramble of unconstrained creativity” are encouraged to work within certain planning guidelines, this may not only improve the structure of their writing, but even enhance their creativity. According to Sharples, “The balance comes from creating appropriate constraints and then choosing a strategy for writing that matches the task.” 114

In the initial burst of creative fervour, students may be resistant to listening to their teacher’s suggestions for planning their creative writing. However, the reaction may be different if the “writing” is to be achieved with a digital camera and editing equipment, rather than pen or keyboard and paper. Although many students are committed to the “go out and shoot what you feel like” approach, it is seldom conducive to anything worth viewing. The same may be true of writing, but the advantage of filming is that this is instantly obvious to the creators themselves. Students may be more easily persuaded into objectivity when watching their own work on screen rather than reading their own written work, because they are already sophisticated viewers of film. They are accustomed to viewing many different types of visual texts, of instantly identifying the characteristics of those different types and of making judgements about them. On the whole, they are likely to be less familiar with such a wide variety of written texts.

Although the mediums are different, video shares many characteristics of writing. Both are created for an audience and both are “read” by that audience. Planning, revising and editing are crucial for both. Therefore, it may follow that video editing may be used as a tool to support students’ writing. Because editing involves structuring images into a coherent narrative, it is possible that editing could be a useful way to help students who have difficulty in structuring their work, who find the Planning approach to writing difficult, those very students who are polarised at the extreme end of the Discoverer’s spectrum in the “ramble” of words.

Digital editing in particular might be a useful tool, offering as it does the possibility to experiment with order and structure. Sharples characterisation of the Discoverer who never reaches the revising and reflecting stage of creative composition might be addressed if Discoverer type students were only offered this stage. If presented with the filming already complete, students would be forced to engage with planning and reflection.

The second starting point for this research is Sharples’ idea about the use of constraints. He posits that constraints are crucial to successful writing:

Constraints allow us to control the multitude of possibilities that thought and language offer. There are so many ideas that we might have, and so many possible ways of expressing them, that we have to impose constraint to avoid thinking and writing gibberish. Constraint is not a barrier to creative thinking, but the context within which creativity can occur. p41

Sharples identifies two types of constraint: internal and external. “Constraints are both external and internal… The internal, mental constraints are of two general types: content (what to write, including the facts and experiences we are able to summon up) and rhetoric (how to write it, including style and structure, to fit the audience and purpose).

As the students were to be selected for this study chiefly for their ability to write “gibberish”, the task should impose constraints, especially of the internal type. The purpose of the study is to examine what kind of role digital editing can play in assisting students with planning and organisation as well as helping them to structure a text with a view to how an audience might read it. Therefore, it would be interesting to attempt to impose internal constraints on ideas of content, but to explore how the subjects address the external constraints.

It may appear bizarre to attempt to restrict ideas and expression in a study where the ultimate hope is to enable students to express themselves creatively. However, as both Sharples and others have written, creativity is not only about expressing ideas freely, but about understanding how to express them. Dan Davies and Alan Howe quote Koestler (1969) on creativity:

The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesises, already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills.

Digital editing, by its very nature, involves these processes. Using the same footage, it would be possible for different groups of students to select, shuffle and combine the same clips in different ways, to “produce outcomes that are both original and of value”.

In addition to the ideas of Sharples, Davies and Howe, some of the principles outlined in Harrington’s work on the “Creative Ecosystem”, were adopted for this research. Harrington proposes that for creativity to flourish, certain conditions must be propitious. Features of this ecosystem considered relevant to this research are:

• Opportunities for “play”
• Permission/support
• Motivation/encouragement
• Open-ended assignments

Harrington appears to disagree with Sharples on some levels, as he writes that “Creativity is facilitated by open-ended assignments with freedom from tight constraints and externally determined outcomes,” but even he agrees that “deadlines can focus minds.” In a classroom context, and within the “tight constraints” imposed on teachers themselves by political strategies and exam boards, it is not often possible to conform to Harrington’s criteria for creativity. However, the task proposed for this study will operate within Sharples’ helpful definition of constraint, while maintaining an “open-ended” nature with no ultimate assessment. The process will remain the important factor in the study. Harrington’s assertion that “creativity is closely associated with play and experimentation” also seems helpful in this context, and particularly relevant to this study, as students will be taken out of English classes to “play” on the digital editing system. They will be encouraged to experiment with the structure and organisation of footage, something that it only possible with a digital system that allows instant experimentation, which can be undone easily without losing work.

To conclude, in this study, ideas about approaches to writing have been transferred to the context of digital editing, to explore how the process of editing may enable students to view their own writing differently and improve their ability to structure and organise their creative writing. As well as an explorative purpose, it is intended that students may take something out of the study that could be used in classrooms, such as suggestions on how to approach their writing in the future, based on what has been observed.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODOLOGY

None of the subjects of this study could be said to view their writing as “creative design”. They were all selected for their ability to create imaginative narratives without being able to structure their ideas in a way meaningful for their audience. Some of them had severe spelling problems, which prevented them from taking full pleasure in their creative writing. Others, while stronger spellers, tended to have so little structure to their writing that it meandered through various diversions, never approaching an ending.

Research Questions

The following research questions were selected as potential areas for enquiry within this field.

1. What is the relationship between structure in editing and structure in creative writing?
2. What is the potential for children to transfer skills learnt during editing to their subsequent creative writing?
3. What is the relationship between creativity and structuring with constraints?

Methodology

The research methodology employed was a case study approach, focussing on four students before, during and after the project. The writing of one student was analysed in depth, looking at her creative writing and use of structure before and after the project. The following methods of data collection were used:

• Semi-structured interviews with the students before and after the project
• Observations of case-study children during the project
• Unstructured interviews with the children during the project
• Semi-structured interviews with the class teacher for each case-study child before and after the project.

As indicated, the aim of this research was to make students more aware of what is going on when they edit and when they write. The hope was that if editing can assist with structure in writing, they will be able to take back some of the skills and ideas from digital editing to their creative writing.

The approach taken was to talk to the children first, to explain what was happening and then to observe them carrying out the task without intervening unless asked for technical help. At one point during the project, we discussed opportunities for more experimentation with the work they had produced, without being judgemental. As the students naturally were interested in what the study was “about”, they were told that they had been chosen because they all had vivid imaginations and were creative, but that they had trouble structuring their writing. They were told that they would have the opportunity to look at some of their stories in a different way, through digital video editing and have the chance to play around with the structure of them. Before they began the task, they talked about their feelings about creative writing.

The playfulness and open-endedness of the activity was stressed, as was the idea that there was no “right” way to complete the task. I pointed out that one of the features of digital editing was that perceived mistakes did not matter because they could easily be undone. Children were encouraged to try out combinations of shots and ideas whether they thought they would work or not.

Students were given time constraints as a way of containing such an open-ended task and 31 shots which had been filmed to relate to their stories. The instructions given were:

“ There are 31 shots, based on your story. Several of the shots are similar to give you more choices. Your task is to create a story out of these shots. You do not have to use all of them. Try to play with the structure of the story. The idea is not to reproduce the story your originally wrote, but to make a new story on the screen. You can change the order of the shots as much as you like.

You will have one hour to view all the shots and discuss them. You can write things down if you like but you don’t have to.

Then you will have at least two more hours to arrange and rearrange the shots. You can trim the shots down, adding titles and any effects that you would like.”

FINDINGS

Pre-editing Interviews:

Before the students began editing, they each read a story aloud and we negotiated a decision about which one would be filmed. The criteria for selection were the possibilities the story offered for playing with structure, as well as logistical considerations. Some of the stories involved shape shifting, waterfalls made of chocolate and islands that floated in the sky guarded by flying cows. These elements were considered beyond the capabilities of the low-budget film crew! As a group, we discussed the fundamental differences between writing and film, such as how film has to convey meaning and motive through showing, whereas, especially in a first person written narrative, emotions and thoughts can be conveyed directly to the reader. There was some brief discussion on how we could overcome these considerations in filming this particular story. However, the students involved in the project were deliberately not involved in the actual filming of the story for three reasons. Firstly, I wanted them to be open to different ways of telling the story just from the shots they were given and, secondly, I was keen not to “close down” the potential meanings in the story, but to keep the narrative as open as possible. Thirdly, I was keen to make the focus of the activity the editing rather than the filming and wanted to avoid discussions of the filming process while the editing process was taking place.

The reason for filming one of the students’ own stories was so that they would feel connected to and interested in, the material. Although only one story was filmed and different narratives made from it, I hoped that the way that it was selected through group negotiation would help the students feel that in some way, they were working with their own material. Preliminary investigations using the same students showed that when they were asked to edit existing commercial material, they felt intimidated be it and found it impossible to edit without the feeling that there was a correct sequence of shots. Finally, this first interview focussed on the children’s feelings about creative writing. They were asked the following questions:

1. How do you feel when you’re asked to write a story?
2. What are your story writing strengths?
3. What do you find most difficult?

One students, Adam, admitted that the thought of creative writing filled him with dread. The others talked about a mixed response of excitement and apprehension. They all individually decided that their main strength was “thinking up good ideas”. Lucy said that the good ideas didn’t “work out when you try to put them on paper”. She also said that creative writing was easier at home when there was more time and peace to think things through and that writing was less daunting when there was a “topic” to write about. Emma and Lucy were both clear that they did not like too many instructions to follow when writing stories. By topic, they mentioned both a general area such as “Other Worlds”, which may come out of a scheme of work, or a writing constraint such as a first person account, a journey or a letter.

Hadden, the fourth member of the group, found creative writing a bit of a chore, but exciting. He cited his main problem as that of endings, meaning that he never reached the end of a story. He thought he had finished a story once in Year 3, but that was only because the bell was about to ring and he wanted to go early! Therefore, for the last four years, he claimed that he had never reached the end of a piece of creative prose writing. When I asked him how he felt about this, he was not sure, but decided that it would be good to get to the end of a story one day. His expectations of his own writing were that he would not expect to finish anything he had started. He was articulate about his writing, recognising that “getting sidetracked” was responsible for never reaching a conclusion.

For Emma, spelling was a major problem in writing. Her story was selected for filming because, after many drafts, it was the most simple and structured. Although relatively sophisticated in general structure and sentence construction, the teacher graded it at a Level Four because of Emma’s severe spelling problems. It was obvious that Emma had very little idea of which words were spelled correctly. She talked about preferring to write on the computer because she could use the spell check facility to see which words were wrong, “then you get lots of different words and you have to decide which one is the one you want”. Emma also said that she had difficulties in knowing “how to start it off.” The story chosen for filming opened with a situation suggested by the teacher, so she had found this easier.

Observations during the editing process:

The framework for the observations was based on the original research questions and on the conceptual framework outlined in Section One. Notes were made around the following ideas:

• The editing process encourages Discoverers to take a Planner approach with regard to structure
• Creativity comes out of uncovering, selecting, re-shuffling and combining already existing ideas

Discoverers, Planners and Structuring

The two groups adopted different approaches. The girls, Lucy and Emma, watched selected shots then wrote down a potential order and checked the order before beginning editing. Therefore, they displayed something of an initial planning approach. They also watched and re-watched “what we’ve got so far” at regular intervals and changed the structure as they went along. They showed far more evidence of planning in the process of editing than they did in their writing:

Lucy: Shall we put that walking shot between, or it won’t make sense?
Emma: No, ‘cause it’s part of the story.
Lucy: Maybe we should show that close up shot instead.
Emma: We could try it. Maybe in between, we could put a rock climbing one. First it’s…yeah, that one.

Most of the limited discussion between the students during the editing process focused around this idea of the film “making sense” to the audience. They also discussed wider issues of structure:

Emma: I think we should have View 3 at the beginning
Lucy: But I like the first bit. It sort of starts the story off straight away.

Adam: We should have them as the first two shots
Hadden: No, ‘cause he’s stood on the rock. Play it again…I think we can take out the first clip altogether.

Hadden, who showed the most sophistication in his approach to editing in such a limited time, began to look in more detail at the pace of the narrative, with comments such as, “There’s way too much walking at the beginning. It’s boring” and “That’ll be long enough. Four seconds of looking at a map is far too long.” Hadden also began to think of how emotion could be conveyed in the film, beyond the basic placing together of the shots. His conversation showed that he was aware of motive, “you need to keep the idea of him looking at something,” and of how emotions could be expressed to the audience:

Hadden: Let’s cut that clip so you only get the close up of his expression.
Adam: (Laughing) He looks really like waah!
Hadden: He looks shocked. He’s lost his baby. That’s how you would look isn’t it?

Inevitably, having been encouraged to play and experiment, the students occasionally lost sight of the narrative structure altogether. Adam was the most likely to drift entirely away from the activity, speculating on the shots that could have been included with comments like, “Why don’t we make him climb to the top, go completely schiz and then kill himself? Jump off the rock mate. Do it. Do it.” At times like this, the communication between the two broke down, with Hadden continuing with the activity on his own, ignoring Adam, but still talking through his editing decisions aloud. The girls operated in a slightly different way. Although Lucy was by far the more confident of the two and the natural leader, she often deferred to Emma, as it was Emma’s story that had been filmed. This meant that their decisions were far more negotiated than they otherwise may have been

Creativity and re-shuffling

None of the students approached the activity as a simple chronological ordering of the shots. This may have been due to the pre-editing discussions outlined above, where they were encouraged to experiment. They all initially put the shots into order and then began to play around with what they had. Their willingness to re-shuffle and trim shots increased along with their growing confidence in their ability to use the equipment. Occasionally, they cut and pasted shots to create new meanings:

Emma: It’s OK, but it doesn’t flow. We’ve seen him climb the same bit, just in a different place. We could put in some scenery shots I suppose, but…no.
Lucy: Unless we cut that one down and put them together.
Emma: That’s quite clever actually.

The nature of the digital editing equipment encouraged the students to experiment, especially when they realised through practice that they could not lose their work.

Lucy: We could have that one then that one. No, he’s already there.
We’ll take that out, then we’ll watch it and if we don’t like it, we’ll put it back in again.

Post-editing Interviews

As I had anticipated, the students found it very difficult to talk about the similarities between the process of writing and the process of editing. Maybe because they were not in the habit of editing their written work, they struggled to see the connections between changing the structure and pace of narrative. They were all agreed that editing was “much easier because there are no words to worry about”.

Emma, who really struggles with spelling, was very clear on this point. She said that her spelling held her back and made her very anxious about the story so that she couldn’t think about where the story was going to go because she was so worried about the words she was going to have to use. The suggestions given below attempt to address Emma’s anxiety by encouraging her to focus on pictures rather than words.

Lucy also said that in film, the audience could work things out from what they see, whereas in writing, it was necessary to spell out every emotion, motivation and thought. We talked about how it might be possible to use the film techniques of showing the audience and creating enigmas in the writing process and this was incorporated into the suggestions for writing given below.

Although Adam had expressed frustration with the limited shots during editing, in their interviews, all students said that only having a certain number of shots had helped them not only to complete the task, but also to structure the narrative. They went further and suggested that because they had to think round a way of creating the effect they wanted, the final effect was more impressive. For example, as the actor in the story did not actually jump off the cliff as Adam wanted, the boys trimmed a clip to show him standing on the top of a cliff, and followed this clip with a shot of the cliff minus the man. They talked about how it was better for the audience to “fill in what had happened” with their own imagination.

New directions for creative writing

Based on the observations and discussions, students were sent away to write more stories with the following suggestions:

1. Try to “see” your story in your head as you plan it out. Think of it as a film. You could try dividing it into shots as we did on the Casablanca.
2. You don’t have to know exactly what is in each clip, but you should have an idea of where the complete story is going, e.g. is the man going to jump off the cliff or is he going to find his daughter? If you don’t want to decide on the end at this point, have a few different ending “shots” worked out.
3. Before you start to write the story, try rearranging the “shots” as you did when you were editing. You could try drawing them, writing a quick description, or you could just hold them in your head.
4. As you write your story, imagine yourself into each picture and write down the picture.
5. Don’t be tempted to wander away completely on a tangent. Remember your shots in your head. Also, remember that in a story everything has a point. If you take up a page writing about something, it should have some significance in the story.
6. When you have finished your writing, read it through, asking yourself whether it would “make sense” to somebody else, just as you did with your film.

SECTION FOUR - DISCUSSION

The numbers involved in this research were very small, so care needs to be taken when analysing findings. Conclusions drawn are based on a mixture of observations, interviews with the students and discussions with the students’ English teacher.

What is the relationship between structure in editing and structure in creative writing?

In thinking about the two broad definitions of writers as either Discoverers or Planners, digital editing, or video editing of any kind, seems to demand more of a Planner approach. When a further constraint of time is imposed, the Planner approach is even more crucial. It is possible to take When these discoverers are faced with the editing process, they instinctively approach it in a different way, thinking about how it will “make sense” to an external audience. There is planning built inherently into the editing process.

What is the potential for children to transfer skills learnt during editing to their subsequent creative writing?

At the start of the project, all of the students involved viewed digital editing and creative writing as two totally separate processes. Even after the study, the similarities had to be pointed out to them explicitly before they could see any connection. For children who often see writing as a site of anxiety and film or editing as a chance to play and experiment, this is not altogether surprising. It would be too much to expect students to be able to articulate how the skills learnt during editing could transfer to their writing. However, during the post-editing interview, as can be seen in Section Three, we were able to draw out ideas about meaning making, making sense and structuring.

The new directions for writing given to the students were intended to help them to transfer some of the skills they demonstrated both during the task and in discussion afterwards. When we talked through these ideas, students were able to see what the relationship between writing and editing might be. Lucy compared trimming shots to “cutting out the waffle bits” in writing. She also articulated some ideas about structure when she began to talk about her new piece of writing which she had started earlier, saying that “I’ve written two pages already and I’ve only just got to the main point.” I was able to use the editing process as a way of talking about how cutting sections of writing out can actually improve a story. Lucy discussed the possibility of putting some of her earlier writing into the story later or leaving it out altogether.

With these kinds of writers, the issues for transferring skills are always related to the words. For someone who finds it difficult to write because of technical difficulties, the idea of chopping out sections of their work is incredibly difficult. The fact that they were able to do this easily on the editing facility and see the results instantly made it easier to approach the subject of doing the same thing in their writing.

Ultimately, with students who find it challenging to write at all, it may be useful to stress the planning element more thoroughly, to gain more of a balance between the Discovery and Planning approaches. One of the crucial elements of a successful Discovery writer is that they redraft and edit, something that these students find difficult for reasons given above. Consequently, they tend to leave out this crucial redrafting stage altogether. As the Planning approach requires some working out of possibilities to begin with, the study’s last phase, to write a new story using the “new directions” guidelines, encourages students to plan as they did when faced with the film shots.

What is the relationship between creativity and structuring with constraints?

The concept of constraint as envisaged by Mike Sharples, is that, “constraint is not a barrier to creative thinking, but the context within which creativity can occur.” In this study, one of the aims was to explore whether imposing a constraint through time and available material would help to stimulate students’ creativity. Some of the comments made by the students, such as Lucy saying that, “having a topic is easier,” appear to back up this idea. There was also a sense of achievement expressed by Hadden at having a finished product at the end of the project. In this sense, the project followed the definition of creativity promoted by the Government for educational purposes as it involved an original, valuable outcome.

The main internal constraint investigated in this study is that identified by Sharples as, “rhetoric (how to write it, including style and structure, to fit the audience and purpose).” One of the key findings is that when the children began to edit, they instinctively had a sense of audience and purpose that they did not display in their written work. Many of their comments centred around what “flowed” what “made sense” and what did or did not “fit”. Many of the problems in Lucy’s writing could be overcome if she was able to write with a sense of audience, even on the basic level of sense-making. In the post-editing interviews, students were able to discuss the difference in thinking of the audience in film as compared to writing. Lucy pointed out that when you make a film “you know someone else is going to watch it,” whereas they did not think of their creative writing as something that anyone else, apart from their teacher, may read. As Hadden said, “your teacher isn’t really reading it as a story but to mark it.” This dilemma for teachers, expressed so succinctly by Hadden, is reinforced by Emma’s low Level Four mark. It appears that creativity jostles with spelling for attention and does not always come off best. However, having said this, it is also clear that the two cannot be separated. Emma’s creativity could be extended if her anxiety about spelling could be removed; Hadden’s discoverer’s approach to writing which results in “thinking and writing gibberish” (Sharples), could be helped by some planning skills.

Conclusion

The whole digital editing experience was very valuable in enabling students to see how they could edit their writing in the same way in which they edited film, without requiring them to sacrifice their own written work in the process. It also gave them strategies for structuring stories as they were ruthless in disallowing anything on screen which did not make the narrative “flow”, yet did completely the opposite in their own creative writing. The concept of audience, which they embraced so instinctively in their video editing, did not enter into their written work very often. However, after the process of editing, they were able to see the importance of “making sense” in their creative writing in the same way that they had aspired to in their editing.