Movie Talks/Clip Chats - Trying Something New

I LOVE clip chats (formerly known as "movie talks") - I love using them to introduce new vocabulary and could center my curriculum solely around doing these. However, if your students are like mine, they are not 100% on board when I do one:

• Many students hate the "jerkiness factor" of a clip chat when I play and then pause it to narrate. 
• When I turn off the lights to do the clip chat, many students use that as a time to "close their eyes"
• Even with PQAs and circling, many students do not participate.

So this year, instead of the play/pause narration of the clip, I start out with a dictation first (regular or listen/draw) of 7-8 sentences from the clip chat. When we finish the dictation, then I show the class the clip without interruption or narration - the clip is what the dictation was, just now in visual form. I do not know from whom I learned this, so kudos if it is you (I know that I certainly do not possess the ingenuity to have come up with something like this on my own). I then turn the dictation into a reading (much more expanded and fleshed out), and now I do reading/post-reading activities with it.

Observations

1. So yes - no more narration of the clip. However, compared to the traditional clip chat delivery, I like this much better, because since students are doing a dictation, they are paying more attention due to the nature of the activity.
2. The dictation previews the clip for students. They already have some kind of mental representation of the sentences in their mind (especially if they drew them), so showing the clip after the dictation is either confirming what they know or is filling in mental gaps.
3. Students are still receiving input - it is just coming in a different way.
4. I do miss the narration aspect of a traditional clip chat, but I also do not want students to tune out due to the pause/play factor or the temptation to fall asleep.
5. When students see the dictation-now-as-a-reading, it becomes a type of embedded reading. They have already interacted with the dictation sentences and are now adding new sentences (of they already have a picture due to seeing the clip. All I am doing is confirming their mental picture of the story with Latin sentences).

So give this a try and see what you think!

P.S. In my Latin 1 classes, I am solely focusing on introducing high-frequency vocabulary with lots of exposure and repetitions, so I have almost exclusively been using clip chats and using those as readings! Next semester, I will start introducing some short novellas. From a proficiency perspective, I do not think that novice-low students are ready to read a novella yet in their first semester unless the novella is short, incredibly-focused, and resembles something like Confidence Readers.