Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind Read online

which is a reflection of my skin color. On account of the fact that we are

  innately social creatures, however, this statement conveys a multitude of

  information beyond just skin color. To identify as white is to claim a

  certain social standing and degree of privilege. To identify as white is to xiii

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  claim a shared history and collective experience with other white people.

  To identify as white is to claim familiarity with specific cultural norms,

  mores, and institutions. To identify as white (or any other identity mark-

  er, for that matter) is to tell a story about yourself to yourself and to

  others.

  Stories that result from automatic storytelling are identity affirming

  insofar as they tell a story that allows individuals to make sense of their place in the world. Furthermore, these stories provide insight as to how

  individuals are likely to make sense of others who claim a specific iden-

  tity trait. That these stories are arbitrary—meaning that they are in-

  formed by such factors as time, place, and subjective experience—matters

  little; they affect social reality because they are popular enough so that, in general, people believe them.

  Thus, effortful or automatic, we are always engaged in some form of

  storytelling, whether we are retelling an old story, learning a new one, or questioning the truth of the ones we’ve been told. In this way, we can

  think of storytelling as a fundamental component of our humanity. In the

  following chapters, we begin to explore the nature and origin of stories,

  specifically in the context of doing video production to the K-12 class-

  room.

  ONE

  Instinct

  The reason why so many people are opting out of education is because

  it doesn’t feed their spirit. . . . We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based

  on linearity, and conformity and batching people. . . . We have to recog-

  nize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic

  process. . . . All you can do, like a farmer, is to create the conditions

  under which they will begin to flourish.

  —Sir Ken Robinson, International Advisor on Education1

  Whenever we ask our college filmmaking students to quantify how many

  movies they have in their heads, they get excited as they contemplate the

  number, because there are so very many. When we first asked K-12 stu-

  dents (all different grade levels), it surprised us when they responded

  exactly the same way.

  It was surprising because we had always thought such a trait was

  more likely to be a sign of a person’s vocational attraction to the practice of filmmaking. But as we’ve come to find time and time again, thinking in

  moving pictures is actually more of a universal human quality than a

  specialized one. And recent developments in neuroscience (Gazzaniga,

  2012) have confirmed studio-like story factory our minds are capable of

  building.

  In his article “The ‘Interpreter’ in Your Head Spins Stories to Make

  Sense of the World,” brain researcher Michael Gazziniga explains, “This

  is what our brain does all day long. It takes input from other areas of our brain and from the environment and synthesizes it into a story.” In this

  light, the human mind could be seen as an organic moviemaking ma-

  chine.

  We recently had an opportunity to see this “moviemaking machine”

  in full gear when we asked a group of middle school students to create

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  visual stories about their school experiences. In most cases, the visual

  story process began with extensive conversations. We asked kids about

  what they wanted to tell stories about and since as a rule they had so

  many stories to tell, as opposed to just one, our challenge was to help

  them narrow down their many stories to the one they felt most important

  to share. This process involved many sessions and many conversations

  before single stories were arrived at.

  During one of our school visits, later in the story development pro-

  cess, four kids asked if they could join in the already-underway story

  project. We agreed to include them, and since time was of the essence—it

  was time to finish the stories as opposed to starting them at this point in the project—we asked them to be part of a storytelling experiment. Instead of having multiple sessions of conversation-based story develop-

  ment, we wanted to see if we could actually “extract” a movie that was

  already in their head.

  One of the latecomers, Aadila, quickly volunteered. The question we

  posed to her was, “Children have told us that they have all kinds of

  movies in their head. These stories are about everything in their lives. Do you have movies like this in your mind?”

  “Yes,” she replied without hesitation.

  “Could you please share the essence of one of those movies in your

  head that is about school? Even if you have a hundred stories about

  school, share the first one that comes to mind and don’t worry whether

  it’s right or wrong or good or bad, just tell us what it is.”

  For one, slow motion moment, Aadila’s wide eyes looked upward in

  the direction of some distant dream and then returned. She proceeded to

  tell us a long and vivid account about how the daily antics of her fellow

  seventh graders were so destructive in the school environment. They

  almost always started with some sort of Facebook incident, then confron-

  tations in classrooms, fights (what she termed the “free admission enter-

  tainment”), and some unexplainable, instant and infuriating reconcilia-

  tion. Yes, this was an everyday occurrence at her middle school and it

  came down to one word: drama.

  What was surprising about Aadila’s response was not just how instant

  it was. It was over in a matter of thirty seconds, it was very “logistically doable” as a visual story, and the kids who witnessed it wanted in. What

  was also surprising was how rich and interesting the story was, easily

  comparable to stories that had taken days and even weeks to develop

  with other story groups. It’s certainly possible that we just got lucky with Aadila’s first movie. But the more we’ve thought about it since finishing

  the story titled “Drama,” the more we’ve seen this experiment as a bell-

  wether of innate student capabilities and natural resources.

  Instinct

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  Tools

  Though videomaking is technically not organic—it is a technological process—it has a strong association with the very organic practice of

  storytelling. Human beings, young and old, are hardwired to tell stories,

  and video cameras give them a rich visual resource to do so.

  Video cameras are certainly not the only tools of organic learning that

  learners have at their disposal. Videomaking is one of many educational

  technologies that can be harnessed for organic learning, or as Robinson

  framed it, conditions for human flourishing. The computer, along with

  the world of applications and online accompaniments, offers the same

  conduit to organic learning with a camera. Interestingly neither of these

  tools can make use of organic learning in and of t
hemselves.

  The recent failure of the British ICT curriculum—the Information and

  Communication Technologies component that guides educators on stan-

  dards in teaching technology and communications—curriculum in Brit-

  ain demonstrates precisely this point. This top-down introduction to ba-

  sic computer skills and technology failed because of its near complete

  disconnection to the root of the learning process: the learner. UK Educa-

  tion Secretary Michael Gove2 explained the problem wasn’t the technology, but rather how it was being used in the classroom:

  By withdrawing the Programme of Study, we’re giving teachers free-

  dom over what and how to teach, revolutionising ICT as we know

  it. . . . By withdrawing the Programme of Study, we’re giving teachers

  freedom over what and how to teach, revolutionizing ICT as we know

  it. . . . Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to

  use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able

  to write simple 2D computer animations. . . . By 16, they could have an

  understanding of formal logic previously covered only in University

  courses and be writing their own Apps for smartphones.

  This bottom up realization on Grove’s and the UK’s part raises another

  very important question about organic learning environments: At what

  point in the learning process should the learners be introduced to the

  tools of learning?

  Sooner Is Better

  The reality is that when it comes to technology, children are ready to

  engage, should we allow them to, very early on in their development—

  certainly at the beginning of their formal education. Though by no means

  technology experts, as many digital immigrants might nervously claim,

  they are ripe for real and deep learning, not unlike the way they interact

  with everything from toys to language. For instance if you put a very

  young child (2 or 3 years old) in front of a computer, they will not only

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  learn how to use it with surprisingly little prompting, but they will also

  use it to learn more.

  This incredible tendency has both excited and infuriated educators

  like Anthony Lorenzo. Anthony was a fourth grade teacher and ICT Co-

  ordinator for two schools in the Tuscany region of Northern Italy. What

  struck us immediately upon meeting him was his continually flowing

  energy and ideas when it came to the challenges of education. We didn’t

  have much time to work with him before his long teaching day would

  take him away, so we talked fast and got to know each other very quick-

  ly.

  The moment we walked into his classroom, the principal of the school

  notified him that the school’s server had crashed on one of the most

  important days of the school year. Anthony apologized almost at the

  same moment that he deftly vanished and restored the server, after

  which our conversations continued.

  He was clearly a passionate teacher with an open mind and un-

  quenchable curiosity. Beyond the incredible romantic facade of his two

  “storybook” campuses, Anthony faced the same challenges and valued

  the same outcomes of teachers we have talked with across the United

  States. Looking at those challenges, like archaic school systems, and those desired outcomes, like the goal to inspire lifelong learning in children,

  from the other side of the ocean gave poignant clarity to the organic

  opportunity to connect with twenty-first-century learners. Ironically we

  were seeing it as plain as day in an environment more often associated

  with the fourteenth-century Renaissance.

  It was difficult to contain our videomaking sensations as this “com-

  puter guy” demonstrated on a small table in the school’s art studio—

  windows overlooking winding vineyards, rolling hillsides, terracotta

  rooftops, and the unmistakable aura of the distant duomo—a prototype of a 3D interactive art display utilizing Wii game hardware and free software available on the web.

  What continually infuriated Anthony, in stark contrast to the exciting

  technological possibilities of the twenty-first-century world, was that he

  had all kinds of ideas about computer and media literacy, but not enough

  opportunities to apply them to the numbers of people who would benefit

  from them. “If I could just have them, for even a short amount of time,”

  he implored, “I know I could give students these essential lessons about

  computers and computing to empower them for the rest of their lives. It

  doesn’t have to be much!”

  The trouble was, on both sides of the Atlantic—and especially in the

  higher grades—finding that extra time in an already stacked curriculum

  weighed down by so many other mandates is challenging, if not impos-

  sible. If only there was a way to get those technological tools of learning to them earlier in their educational development, say in Kindergarten

  where they have the time to “play.” This would require a revolution of

  Instinct

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  sorts to what has always been a delicate and fragile process of introduc-

  ing young learners to the process of education.

  Seeds of Learning

  In another unlikely corner of the world, educational scientist Sugata

  Mitra3 illustrated the possibilities engaging very young learners in a fascinating experiment he called “Hole in the Wall.”

  Mitra placed computer kiosks in slum areas and watched as children

  found and eventually mastered—with no assistance whatsoever, a term

  Mitra coined “minimally invasive learning”—the technology and used it

  for their own learning needs. What this experiment demonstrated is how

  simple human curiosity can ignite learning when the proper tools are

  provided.

  To work in an educational setting, any teaching tool or technology

  depends upon a larger organic force. In the case of video production in

  the classroom, that force is composed of our innate tendency to tell sto-

  ries, our curiosity, and the instinct to learn.

  NOTES

  1. Filmed presentation at Ted Talks, February 2010, titled Bring on the learning revolution!

  See

  http://www.ted.com/talks/

  sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html.

  2.

  http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a00201864/harmful-ict-

  curriculum-set-to-be-dropped-this-september-to-make-way-for-rigorous-computer-science.

  3. See Hole in the Wall on Mitra’s website. http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/con-tactus.aspx.

  TWO

  Connection

  There is a consistent question rising up from the latest work we have

  done with K-12 students using video cameras in their classes: Which

  came first: Hollywood or the mind’s eye? In other words does the culture

  of being raised in a world filled with movies and TV shows inform and

  structure our thought process, or is Hollywood derived from the inner

  Cineplex we are born with in our heads?

  This is one of those chicken-and-the-egg questions , complete with the initial commonsensical trap, “Of course it had to be the egg (the mind’s

  eye) because how could you have the chicken (Hollywood) without first

  having an egg?” The quest
ion also has a chicken-first answer.

  The Chicken Answer

  If you ask a college-age filmmaking student how many movies they

  have in their head, they can’t usually put a specific number on the notion, but they do admit there are a lot—maybe hundreds—and they delight in

  the idea of one day sharing them all with others.

  The problem with all these movies in their heads is that there is no

  easy way to get them out, at least when it comes to conventional film and

  television production practices. Filmmaking is one of those things in life

  that looks so easy to do, mostly because we can effortlessly watch these

  works as audiences of them, but in reality it is extremely difficult.

  When freshman filmmakers screen their very first works they are of-

  ten embarrassed. It’s liberating for them to show the films, but they are

  rarely satisfied with what they see on the screen. The problem is that their idea of their film was so clear and beautiful in their head, but something

  got lost in the translation from their head to the screen. It’s not that

  they’re dumb or incapable of being successful filmmakers. It’s just very

  difficult to do and takes a few drafts to make presentable.

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  What would it be like if these students could magically monitor that

  special place in the brain where their visual imagination resides and di-

  rectly project their inner movies on a screen for everyone else to see?

  There would be no need for cameras, lighting, microphones, or even

  scripts. Their movie stories would all be right at their fingertips, flowing, revealing, and clear.

  But without such a miracle monitor, most of what we do in the movie-

  making process is a clumsy attempt to replicate the mind’s eye by re-

  presenting our stories on the screen in much the same manner that our imaginations project them in our brain tissue, complete with the illusion

  of visual and aural perception, point of view, focus, and perhaps most

  importantly: meaning.

  When asked the “Which came first?” question, young filmmakers

  might be inclined to lean toward Hollywood, given their recent discovery

  of how difficult and unnatural it is to transform their personal narratives to the screen. The mind’s eye may be something they were born with, but