PACOIMA : Gifted, Disabled Students Shoot Video Together

The camera operator sets up a medium close-up shot with his video recorder as the cast of the music video reviews the choreography one last time.

Something has gone wrong with the lighting equipment, but sixth-grader Greg Nowlin, one of the technical directors for the production, has it all under control. Teacher Taffy Patton, who coordinated the music video project for Vena Avenue Elementary School’s magnet program, stands back and smiles at her students who are dancing to loud rap music.

The effort is a school project of the ‘90s: A merging of music, dance and technology that combine a class from a gifted magnet elementary school with a class of developmentally disabled high schoolers.

Four years ago, Patton began working with Michael Monagan, a teacher at Widney High School for mentally and orthopedically disabled kids in South-Central Los Angeles.

The project: make a video together.

The students do it all by themselves--write the music, choreograph the steps, film the production and edit the final take.

“Doctor, Doctor,” Tuesday’s video project, was shot in a bungalow at Vena’s magnet school. It features a song about the fears disabled children experience when they go to a doctor’s office. The musical track was written by the Widney students in Monagan’s studio at the high school. There, Monagan and the students record the songs with a synthesizer and a sequencer, choreograph movements to the songs and then send those recordings to Patton’s class.

The sixth-graders at Vena work on the production aspect of the video. They have learned techniques for lighting and sound design, video camera operation and technical direction.

The idea for the music video program came from an Arts & Entertainment show called “The Gifted Ones” about musical and art prodigies, which the magnet students watched. Patton assigned them a project to research “how much of such a gift is hard work and how much is what you’re born with.”

Hassan Massiri, age 11, who has become friends with a number of the Widney students, said, “I especially enjoy how they want to learn. They are really very smart.”

Eighteen-year-old Shelly Goodhope, who will be graduating from Widney in 1997, said he found the experience “fun and dazzling,” and has decided “to put the movies on hold and be a rock star instead.”