Inspiring Young Filmmakers: Panasonic Malaysia Hosts Kid Witness News Training Camp

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RISING STARS: According to education and theatre activist Normah Nordin, the ideas presented in these students’ video production assignment were a reflection of the voices of the future.

KUCHING: What would you teach the world about saving the planet? What would you teach the world about communication? Based on these two themes, Eco and Communication, Panasonic Malaysia recently hosted a Kid Witness News (KWN) training camp to inspire and teach young filmmakers from the age 10 to 15 years old on how to produce a five minute video at Quality Hotel Shah Alam.

In collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Panasonic Malaysia’s Kid Witness News is an annual video education programme for primary and secondary students, aiming to cultivate creativity, inspire curiosity, critical thinking, develop confidence and team work among these students.

According to a press release, the programme had seen a total of 3,500 participants, since its inception in 2005. This year’s KWN Training Camp came after the preliminary stage of school selection, based on the creativity and originality of their submitted storyboards via the KWN website.

“KWN is a challenging and rewarding hands-on video education programme. This training camp is conducted with the objective to equip students with the knowledge and skills on how to produce a video that express their views and ideas on current issues of the environment and communication,” said Azizah Wahid, general manager of Corporate Communications & Branding, Panasonic Malaysia Sdn. Bhd.

“It is also one of Panasonic’s key corporate social responsibility programmes. Through this programme, we hope to educate and help children develop their creativity, leadership and organisational skills through hands-on exercise in producing a video.”

“For the training, each school is represented by a teacher and two students and all participating schools are provided with a unit of Panasonic HD broadcast camera including accessories and editing software for the video production purposes,” she added.

“Students and teachers were briefed on the video production process from pre-production, production to post-production. Pre-production covers topics such as developing a storyboard, script writing and directing; while production covers areas such as techniques of camera work, shooting, lighting and sound. The post-production topic focuses on editing techniques,” stated Othman Hafsham, a renowned film director who is also the chief trainer of the KWN Training Camp.

According to education and theatre activist Normah Nordin, the ideas presented in these students’ video production assignment were a reflection of the voices of the future.

To encourage global networking for participating students worldwide, KWN Global Office had launched the KWN Our Place, an on-line bulletin board that allowed everyone who participated in KWN activities to interact, read and write news items and submit comments over the network.

With this platform students from all participating schools could use the bulletin board to facilitate cross-school communication.

For further information on the KWN Our Place, members of the public can log onto http://panasonic.net/kwn/kwn_ourplace/login.php.