These pages are designed to help deliver some aspects of the National Literacy Strategy using film, a medium that engages children in a unique and powerful way. Films can tell stories in a distinctive manner but they are still stories, with characters, settings, themes, introductions, build-ups, climaxes and resolutions. Finding out about these elements of stories forms a significant part of the Literacy Strategy Text Level objectives.

Stories, whether written in books, narrated orally or told in film, are usually about more than entertainment alone. They have many purposes and underlying messages. Stories offer exposure to knowledge about worlds and subjects that we may never have the opportunity to experience for ourselves. They can also provide us with the chance to reflect on the world that we do know.

To understand a story in film, we need to use a similar set of skills to reading in that we have to make sense of it. The sense is by no means given and is most often implied or embedded in the codes and conventions with which film communicates. These are skills that we often take for granted. We know a good film when we have seen one. So what makes it good? What keeps the viewer engaged? What makes the difference between a good film and someone else’s not so exciting holiday movie? This question can be linked to the questions we pose in literacy, such as ‘How should we structure our work for different purposes?’ ‘What language devices could we use to engage our audience?’ ‘What do you think the character is feeling here?’ ‘What is the setting and why do you think the author chose it?’ and so on.

These are questions that primary school teachers are working on with children daily using written texts. Moving image texts can provide another way of looking at the same themes.