Review of Online Christian Filmmakers Academy | #onlinefilmcamp

For the last few weeks my daughter and I have been studying Christian filmmaking with Online Christian Filmmakers Academy from Family Gravity Media, a division of Families For Christ Ministries, Inc.

This course is so thorough and brought to you by father and son team, Ken and Zack Lawrence, who have actually gone through the process of movie production. Their productions include the film, In His Steps along with the TV Series, Welcome Home Antelope Valley and various DVD releases. 

Online Christian Filmmakers Academy is a video course so each lesson is taught through video. Some lessons have extra handouts that can be downloaded and printed for further study and each module has a quiz at the end. Only 2 of the module quizzes were available at the time of this post because this is a new course and the final touches are currently being added. Throughout the year more material and bonuses are scheduled to be added. 

The course is broken down like this:

• Introduction
• Module 1 - The Camera - 6 lessons and quiz
• Module 2 - Cinematography - 15 lessons and quiz
• Module 3 - Sound - 6 lessons and quiz
• Module 4 - Pre-production - 5 lessons and quiz
• Module 5 - Production - 6 lessons and quiz
• Bonuses 

Lessons vary in time with some lessons only being 1 minute long to the longest being 33 minutes long. Each lesson can be completed pretty quickly so doing more than one lesson per day is extremely doable. However, if you have the equipment you may want to take longer to play around with it. You also can complete the course without any of the equipment mentioned too.

The video lessons were so awesome because we did not own a lot of the equipment so being able to see them in action on the screen really helped us to visually connect with what was being taught. You can tell me about lighting all day long but showing me the different effects really helps me to see the end result that I should be looking for. For instance, in the screen shots below they were showing the visual affects of creating artistically just using light. This example was using a black and white film but the video instructions are in full color. You can see that the shading of the plant gives the white background more interest. 

The PDF downloads were great visual aids in addition to the videos and contained full color illustrations and photos as well as additional information for students. 

The course was extremely easy to navigate through and each lesson was automatically marked complete once you finished watching the video. In the introduction video, students are given complete instructions on how to navigate inside the course which basically means scrolling to the bottom of the screen once finishing a lesson and hitting the next button.

In the top left corner, you can easily navigate through the modules by clicking on the menu button. Each lesson also has a place to leave a comment asking any questions your student might have for the instructors.

For the quizzes that are available, they are completed online and answers are multiple choice. They are also automatically graded for you.

This course was a good fit for my daughter, who is 13 although we did tweak it a little. She has just started her own YouTube channel and uses a point and shoot camera. She learned a lot especially about lighting and sound but the material was more than she could retain at times so we decided that she would skip the quizzes for now and just focus on the video lessons. I took the quizzes myself.

The course is available for one year so you can work on it at your own pace. Until November 30, 2016 you can save $100 off the regular price by entering coupon code FALLCREW16 on the check out page. Each member of your family can use this course as long as it is completed in the year's time frame.

You can find out more about the Online Christian Filmmakers Academy by visiting their Facebook Page.