Interview with Beata Kowalczyk English teacher in the Lycée Français de Varsovie René Gościnny.
First of all allow me to congratulate you on your award! Can you tell us more about yourself, about your pupils and about the competition?
Sure! My name is Beata Kowalczyk and I am the English teacher in the French High School in Warsaw, Lycée Français de Varsovie René Gościnny. It is our third participation in the video competition entitled “Je Filme le métier qui me Plaît”, i.e. “I make a film about a job I like”. The competition consists in making a video of 3 minutes about a job that seems interesting to students. The aim of the film competition is to facilitate young students the choice of their future professional career and discover the advantages and drawbacks of many jobs.
Having made films about a teacher for deaf children in Warsaw, a volunteer to help Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and a deer breeder in Mazovia region, we decided to search for an innovative job.
Sounds amazing! Does Comixify fit this profile ?
The idea sprang to me after watching a morning Polish TV programme where the CEO Comixify engineer, M. Tomasz Trzcinski, was talking about their company. I already knew it would be the an excellent idea for our new film.
I contacted M. Tomasz Trzcinski, we met and we started the project. After the beginning of the school year, together with my fellow teachers, Ms Marie Bis and Mr Emmanuel Levy, we started the new adventure in our school. We invited 8th year students for this enterprise. They were seduced with the idea and we started writing the scenario, which was changed many times. Then, we wrote and drew storyboard (by hand and on the computer), and we wrote the script of the film, pointing our everybody’s role. It was very important as it grandly helped during the real filming process. During the shooting, nobody bothered about what he had to do, everybody knew his/her text and the place he/she should be at. Everything went smoothly.
Must be tons of fun to plan it and write it! I understand that at some point Tomasz joined you for your shooting ?
The meeting with our guest star engineer, M. Tomasz Trzcinski, was very efficient, thanks to his professional attitude, excellent language competence and the instant ability to work with the camera. In two hours we managed to do most of the work and to shoot the scenes that we predicted, the core of our film. As we wanted to show the viewers the comixifying process, two scenes from the film made with Mr Trzcinski were comixified and then printed into a small comixified book. We could realize then how such a huge and complex process of comixificiation was made easy by Tomasz’s team. We were impressed by the speed of processing a picture into a comixified one.
Yes, I agree, I was impressed as well when I joined the company! I believe that the best part was still ahead? As I do remember our conversation about changing your film into real, printed comics!
YES! Then, we filmed the scene at the school library, with the comixified book. You provided us with advice how to print these comixified images and explained to us the research work on comixifying process.
Thank you! We do like to help with any education projects we can! As you can imagine we don’t have time to look for them but we are always super open to work with young students and passionate teachers if we can!
Both you and Tomasz were really helpful at every stage of the project and provided us with valuable information we needed. We would like to thank you once again for your participation in our project and for the time allotted to our curious students. Thus, who knows, maybe one of them will become a computer engineer … ?
Happy to hear that! Tell me more about the final “product”
What we wanted to show in our film, was that the job of a computer engineer does not consist in sitting in front of the screen, drinking five coffees and eating fast food. The students had a lot of fun filming the stereotypes about the job of a computer engineer and using numerous accessories!
Haha! I must share this vison with the team!
In reality, a computer engineer does not wear worn-out clothes and big glasses, but is an extrovert young man or woman, enjoying professional and private life, leading to many interesting projects. We wanted to show the young audience that the job of a computer engineer is not boring at all.
And with all this done the award was yours! How do you feel about it ?
First of all, it is our common success ! We are very pleased having received the Golden Award for the film in the 13th edition of the video competition “Je Filme le métier qui me plait”, thanks to the Comixify team! Without your help, the video would not have been noticed. We did a great job together. I must tell that this year everything went smoothly without any obstacles and the students were very mature for their young age ; they are only 13 !
We are proud to help and once again congrats on the award! As a teacher can you think about more situations where comixify can be used as a teaching tool ?
Oh yes, as an English language teacher, I have great imagination. 😊 I think that comixification can be used in students’ telling stories on different topics. Instead of writing the whole story, they can take pictures or shoot a short film, like I do with my students, and then create a comic strip with bubbles and comixified pictures. It is more challenging than just writing a simple story or interview. Because there are different trends of comixifying a picture, students can choose also the visual aspect of their story. I am thinking also about comixified pictures that could be used by language teachers in creating language photo cards with comixified pictures of objects. The possibility of using a computer while doing school homework is always more challenging. For younger students, the use of the comixifying process can be both an English assignment as well as a computer science one. Thus, students can get better at applying the instructions of the internet research and then, using the comixifying tool to process their visual aids.
I would like to thank the whole Comixify team for the project, the information you shared with us on the job of a computer engineer and for the bunch of fun we had discovering the multiple facets of your job!
I can truly recommend Comixify engineers as very reliable partners.
Here is the link to our video :
https://www.parcoursmetiers.tv/video/8863-la-bd-une-sacree-idee
You are the best !