Multi-media festival impresses at Sydenham High School

Dec 18, 2014

The impressive multi-media work of close to 200 students at Sydenham High School was included at the biennial Multi-media Festival, which was held at the school on December 11.

Headed up by Dawn Wallace, who has been teaching multi-media communications and technology at the school for the last seven years, the show included displays of student work in video, graphic design, introductory and advanced photography, printmaking, painting, animation, and sound mixing. Some of the highlights of the show included specific projects assigned to the communications technology students in grades 9 through 12, which included colorful mock movie posters, photo collages and entries in three separate student portfolio competitions, which included work in photography and graphic design.

I spoke to fifth-year student, Todd Muller, who entered his portfolio into the grade 11 photography competition. Muller has always loved photography and decided just this year to pursue that passion by enrolling in the introductory photography course that Wallace teaches. His portfolio submission included numerous intriguing, technically proficient and expertly composed photos of subjects that included hyenas at the Toronto Zoo, which were taken during a school photography trip there earlier this year. Muller said photography is a subject that he is seriously considering pursuing after high school at Sheridan College and possibly also at Ryerson. “I really love the creativity involved and the fact that you can be artistic with photography. I especially love staging my photos and for me that is where the artistry and creativity comes into play.”

At the show, Wallace beamed with pride at the students’ work and said that the communications technology and multimedia courses are important because they represent the “language of the day”. “The students are learning the ABCs of visual and audio language and basically all of the fundamentals that they need to know to pursue learning in this field,” she said. She added that she is often surprised and inspired by the work of her students. “I am often blown away by the work they create and often it is they who are teaching me new things, which makes teaching them, for me, a real privilege.” Wallace said a big part of her job is to help students develop their own voice and she said it is tremendously exciting to watch students find the media that best expresses who and what they are. Her words certainly ring true in the mock movie posters that were created by grade 10 students. Colorful, artistic, unique and savvy, one has to look very closely to realize that these posters are not the real thing - though they could easily be.