12 Essential English – Hero and Villain Pop Culture Unit – An introduction to Into the Spiderverse

1. A PPT to introduce students to the second of the two films they can write a film review about for their assessment {a multimodal presentation}. It includes: some quick facts about the comic-book origins of the character and the creator. Information about King pin and his origin story in the comics. The inspiration for the film. A link to the trailer is included for introducing who the key players in the film are. Students are provided with information about the director, producer etc. to add into their retrieval chart. This is followed by images of the costumes of key characters (Kingpin, Prowler, Miles etc.) so that students can take notes about colour & props.

2. A film viewing report card (retrieval chart) to be used in subsequent lessons while viewing the film

Context: A lesson designed for use in a 12 Essential English classroom in Queensland, Australia as part of Unit 4: “Representations and popular culture texts.” During this unit students learned about Hero and Villain films and how filmmakers use cinematic techniques to portray them and create an intended message. Their assessment at the end of this unit was to write a 4-6 minute multimodal (speech) to be delivered live or pre-recorded reviewing one of the three films shown within the unit.

Films focused on in this particular year: Wonder Woman & Into the Spiderverse