Students were treated to an exclusive look into the world of making and producing movies when Dr. George Hero took his History Through Film classes and members of the Film Club to the Museum of the Moving Image on October 15.
     “I wanted students to gain the greater understanding of history of how films were made,” said Dr. Hero.
        Located in Astoria, Queens, the museum is home to thousands of film and television artifacts that have been collected since its opening in 1981. The museum is currently under renovation and is closed to the general public, with only group and school tours available until its reopening in 2011.
        Upon arriving at the museum, the large group was divided into smaller packs and each group’s tour began in a separate part of the museum. Tour guides slowly led the clusters of students through the exhibits, explaining everything on display, including film cameras from the early 1900s and props utilized in movies such as Freddy Krueger’s trademark red and green striped sweater, used the classic Nightmare On Elm Street. Another popular sight at the museum was a long wall, completely covered in photographs of famous actors and actresses, including Charlie Chaplin, Clint Eastwood, and Marilyn Monroe.
       “The museum is a real treasure,” Dr. Hero said. “It gives you a real sense of film history.”
        Exhibits weren’t the only attraction at the museum; pupils also got a chance to try out stop-motion movie making. Armed with laptops, webcams, and cutouts of various animals and props, students made movies by taking pictures of slightly different scenes that when put together created a short animation.
        The tour was completed with a screening of a Charlie Chaplin classic, The Immigrant, showed in the museum’s beautiful Tut’s Fever Movie Palace.
        “We saw some of the earliest films created and got a much greater look into the technical aspects of filmmaking,” he said.