Brick Maier - developer of the Tabletop Moviemaking method.
The Tabletop Moviemaking method was developed by Brick Maier, a former middle school Language Arts teacher in Los Angeles. The method and all its support materials are the result of three years of action research conducted by Brick while on a Fulbright grant in Ireland in 2004. His method has been used throughout Ireland and across Europe. From film festivals in Amsterdam to media workshops in Dublin, Tabletop Moviemaking has been widely praised as an exciting new sustainable method for using digital video to tell stories.
Tabletop Moviemaking draws on the history of Juvenile Drama and puppet theatre popularized in the Victorian period. Painters Jack B. Yeats and Salvador Dali, and filmmaker Orson Wells are among some of the more well known enthusiasts. Tabletop Moviemaking preserves the core elements of the experience while leveraging the power of digital video to add a new creative element and share it with a broader audience.
The mission of Tabletop Moviemaking is to honor the articulate mind and creative spirit present in every child through digital storytelling and the writing process. It is the aim of the method to place the author’s voice and lived experience at the center of the production process while using new distribution platforms to share their story with the world.
The objective of Tabletop Moviemaking is to build reading, writing and technology literacy skills using digital video combined with simple and intuitive puppet based animation. Tabletop Moviemaking employs the full production process of making a movie in collaborative group-based environments. From brainstorming to drafting to editing to exporting, participants are at the center of the authoring process.
Here is an introduction to the kit and the core framework of the Tabletop Moviemaking method.