We broke each one down. Is the mood appropriate? How does it achieve that mood? What angles worked? Did it have the five required? What problems were there? What worked well? A lot of silence, mostly me pointing out what works according to my limited and self-taught film critique skills. But this helped build a language for students to use. Without me pointing out things in a shot that work, the way the composition draws the eye in or has too much going on for us to focus, they had nothing to say. They still tend toward silence, but even parroting what I’d said about earlier videos is a step toward them drawing their own conclusions. The revelation that things work better without music was almost entirely theirs.

What We Watched

• Who’s In Residence? – Good use of POV shots, this is an interesting take on the whole Door Scene
• Locke High School AFI Door Scene – Several angles to discuss, this piece shows an actor not smiling, an important lesson my students took and applied to their Door Scene the following day.
• Claim To Fame: Union, New Jersey – The entire videos seeks to answer a single question and that gives the filmmakers a focus, which surely helped them make editing decisions. Ongoing establishing shots give a good idea what the town is like.
• Four Generations (Part One) (Part Two) – At the spot where the family receives the water buffalo (the opening minute or so of part two of this project), we decided it would have been an even more powerful scene without the music. The grandmother is speechless and that is overpowered by the sugary, though well-performed, string soundtrack. The music just so obviously manipulates your emotions that it detracts from how emotional that moment is. Nice observation, class!
• Global Depot Materials Manager – This one was the template for a lot of my students. The way the piece is framed in a single day via the opening and closing shots of the car she drives gave students ideas about what they could do. The way this video handles doors is key, something we spent time in deliberate observation of, using our experience with the Door Scene as a contrast.
• Growing Up Online intro clip (from 2:19 to 5:13) – Another study in establishing shots, this helped set the idea of showing examples of the video’s topic and using interviews.
• Storyboarding – Several basic shots are discussed quickly, giving at least a rudimentary vocabulary to press forward with.

And with that, we dove into making our own videos.

For Your Consideration

I thought about using Roger & Me, Is Wal-Mart Good For America, Murderball, and Wordplay. Almost anything from Frontline would work; using opening credits from TV shows to examine tone and mood is a possibility; one of the extras on About Schmidt demonstrates interesting work with establishing shots.

Speaking strictly of camera technique as storytelling device, how else could you set students up for success when basically the assignment is to take a camera out and investigate the topic you chose? What other examples would you show? How would you frame the discussion? Which resources would you make available?Similar Posts:

• We’ve Begun
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1. Who is Marla Olmstead?
2. What is the controversy surrounding her?
3. How did this controversy arise?
4. What evidence suggests that she is the artist?
5. What evidence suggests otherwise?
6. What did the 60 Minutes crew hope to get on film? What happened?
7. When it finally airs, describe the impact of the 60 Minutes segment about Marla.
8. Why does director Amir Bar-Lev question his involvement in this project?
9. What does the final Q&A between Bar-Lev and Marla’s parents say about Bar-Lev’s attitude toward the subject?

At the very least, provide a T-chart to keep track of evidence for and against Marla Olmstead as the artist. I’m thinking of putting together a list of important quotations, just like I would for any novel. A quick trip over to Marla’s main gallery and students can see the work up close in order to make specific references. The press kit (PDF), available from the main movie site, could very easily be turned into a set of handouts.

Special Feature

My Kid Could Paint That has the added bonus of a fantastic special feature on the DVD (“Michael Kimmelman On Art”). This segment can be shown independent of the rest of the movie. Michael Kimmelman is the chief art critic at The New York Times and someone I’d love to have come in and talk with my students. His insights cover not only art, but the subjective nature of storytelling:

All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something. I mean, all art, in some ways, is a lie. It looks like a picture of something, but it isn’t that thing, it’s a representation of that thing… Your documentary is, itself, going to be a lie. It’s a construction of things. It’s how you wish to represent the truth and how you’ve decided to tell a particular story.

Movies are every bit as valuable as books as a way to discuss philosophical assumptions about a topic, a key component in any English class. Looking at what directors decide to include and omit, we get a sense for their beliefs. And coming in at 82 minutes, you’d get through My Kid Could Paint That in almost the same amount of time as it would take to read 2 short stories.

Sense Of The World

A final thought from Kimmelman:

We come to like and trust in a certain story, not necessarily because it’s the most absolutely truthful, but because it’s a thing that we tell ourselves which makes sense of the world, at least at this moment.

Similar Posts:

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1. Who are Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell?
2. What is the conflict between Wiebe and Mitchell?
3. How was Wiebe’s video of his record-breaking Donkey Kong game received by the video-game playing world depicted in the film?
4. What action did Wiebe take to change that reaction?
5. What did Wiebe accomplish there?
6. How did Billy Mitchell respond?
7. Describe the different reactions to Wiebe’s video and Mitchell’s video.
8. Was Wiebe treated fairly, both by Mitchell and Twin Galaxies?

On The Other Hand………

The interesting thing about documentaries is that they are meant to be objective in theory, but we all know that’s impossible. Language is subjective and film is language. In the editing, subjective decisions are made.

There’s another side to the story presented in this film. Pull some of that information into a concise handout after the first essay is written. How does this inform your decisions about the story presented in this documentary?

There’s a special feature on the disc that would also add to the discussion. In “Bonus Footage,” select “Steve Reacts” and watch until about the three-minute mark (watch the full six minutes, if you’d like). Does that help explain why Wiebe and Mitchell were treated differently? Does it justify the difference?

Students probably won’t care about Donkey Kong. Some won’t even care about video games at all. But the drama of the interaction between the two characters will likely grab them. There’s more to be done with this idea, but I’m curious what you think so far.Similar Posts:

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Challenging Material

The team of educational consultants working on these lessons put together a solid set of ideas for teachers to follow. Back in December of 2002, Bill Moyers interviewed Albert Maysles, a documentary filmmaker. The lesson plans put students in the position of filmmaker, asking them to make a few observations about Maysles’s techniques and then create their own film in his style.

Thorough steps and several options along the way go far toward providing something that teachers can put in place, feeling good about marching their students down the path toward creating the final product suggested.

Weak Organization

The plan references an episode of Bill Moyers NOW, something only available on VHS. Not that big a deal, but worth consideration. The mention of the NOW episode comes with a link to the ShopPBS store. Once at the store, teachers will have to search for the appropriate episode; instead, that link should lead directly to the episode under discussion.

Skipping the purchase of the video means that I miss the Moyers interview (the only person I like better at interviews is Terry Gross, so I don’t take missing that Moyers interview lightly), but the free transcript sits online, waiting for you or your students to read it.

And if I don’t spend the $30, there are clips of Maysles’s films online. I may not be able to show the students an entire film, but they should be able to get the idea behind the techniques from these clips. Add to that the fact that the clips are available for students to view whenever they want and things are looking pretty good.

The clips are not too easy to find, though. Currently, there’s a dropdown box next to “More on This Lesson” (or “More on This Story,” depending on your current page). The contents of that box change as you go from page to page. To find the link to the Maysles clips, you have to navigate a few pages away from the lesson plan.

There must be a better way to organize all these links. It took me far too much hunting and pecking for the additional materials the planning team has worked so hard to provide.

Still, these plans look to be among the best I’ve found online. Have a look at NOW for Educators and let me know what you find.

P.S. This is post #200. Thanks for reading.Similar Posts:

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A friend handed me a packet of material from YMI designed to introduce documentaries and general film literacy to high school students. The useful stuff was accompanied by a much-bigger-than-necessary poster advertising the Academy Awards. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to say that, today, the poster finally completed its long journey to the trashcan. Rest in peace, my paper friend.

The rest of it, though, looks pretty golden and it sits on my coffee table: a DVD with selected segments from 10 documentaries and narrated by none other than Morgan Spurlock, a teacher’s guide explaining the unit and prescribed lessons, and 5 reproducibles, all gearing students up to understand documentaries more and, perhaps, putting them in a position to create one. That’s my biggest hope.

The other 6 parts in the series focus on other facets of film making. A knee-jerk recommendation is that you get your hands on the other parts. The YMI and Academy Web sites don’t seem to provide information for getting the hardcopies of the material. They provide electronic versions of the handouts, but I got a DVD with selected scenes and a narrator for this one. I want that for the other parts, too! The DVD receives no mention on the information page about the documentary packet, so if I didn’t have it in my hand, I wouldn’t even know it exists. Are there DVDs floating around for the other parts? I shot an email off to the contact person at YMI; let’s see what he says next week.

Of course, this comes on the weekend when I really have to buckle down with the grading, but I’ll likely scan through all this and see what it has to offer. My idea of students filming a documentary this semester might come to fruition. Why haven’t I heard of this before? I wish there was a way to stay on top of all the education-related efforts of companies in the private sector. Some of them are doing cool things and making our jobs easier. Thanks to all of them.

Do you have links to any of those cool things some companies are doing for educators? Post a comment and we’ll try to get a list so we know what’s out there for us.Similar Posts:

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