Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind

by Michael Schoonmaker

  expression through video in a similar way that Mrs. Beechwood opened

  up writing as a form of expression without limits for her very young

  writers.

  The basic idea is that students know enough to get started with the act

  of writing before they have attained a complete grasp of the formalities.

  The thought behind this approach to learning writing is that the formal-

  ities will come in time as writing progresses. The same holds true for

  video, should they require a more formal understanding of production

  practices in the future. But as they learn the discourse of video it seems

  conducive to the learning process that they express their video ideas in

  their video way.

  ELEVEN

  Resilience

  In our travels across the country we have discovered a very consistent

  and natural phenomenon when it comes to videomaking in K-12 schools:

  morning announcements are born for video.

  In a pre-video era, morning announcements were monotone recita-

  tions of the pledge, a moment of silence, and relevant school information

  for the day, usually read by the principal or other school official over a

  crackling old PA system.

  Over time, the announcements have slowly evolved with technology,

  from robotic administrative orations to increasingly spirited presenta-

  tions led by student voices along with, in braver schools, music and even

  dramatic performances.

  But overall, the morning announcements seem to be one of the more

  universally distinctive attributes of K-12 culture—something to take for

  granted like a red brick exterior. With the advent of video and other

  communication technologies, morning announcements have come even

  further.

  Colorado 7th grade social studies teacher Devon Wood had witnessed

  the transformation of the morning announcement experience over the

  years and had discovered that students genuinely liked video announce-

  ments more than PA announcements. To Devon, this had a lot to do with

  the extra richness of the information: “They really like seeing anything

  that has to do with them in particular,” he explained. “Pictures, videos of them or someone or something they care about—the more it’s about

  them, the more they watch it.”

  Given our technological expertise when it comes to video, we are

  often consulted by educators on the challenge of converting audio-PA

  based announcements to video announcements, where the question

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  arises: “What is the right way to do morning announcements with

  video?” Over time, we’ve observed two distinctive typologies.

  Formal Announcements

  Don Black’s news studio at a progressive Southern California high

  school, was a captivating example of a formal extreme of the morning

  announcement experience, the organization and professionalism of this.

  This extremely well-coached group of 12−18 year old students was oper-

  ating along the model of a professional journalistic organization. They

  had news meetings where they discussed past, present, and future stories

  including the more academic issues that arose on the periphery of their

  story strategies.

  For example, when they talked about an incident involving a middle

  school student being hit by a car outside the school as he was skateboard-

  ing (resulting in a minor injury), the producer of the story asked if it was appropriate to air a revealing account of the accident from a 10 year-old

  witness. As they were moving closer to a decision not to use the interview, because of the child’s age, a very involved and interesting discus-

  sion ensued about the journalistic appropriateness of certain witness ac-

  counts—not unlike the conversations we hear from the halls of college-

  level journalism classes.

  These were seasoned students who had begun their training in middle

  school and risen up to the ranks of high school producers, directors,

  reporters, and anchors. They were driven and disciplined. It was remark-

  able that Don could communicate so much in such a soft tone. He never

  raised his voice above normal conversation level even though he was

  addressing the entire newsroom scattered with more than twenty stu-

  dents. They were tuned to his frequency and responded quickly and

  thoughtfully in the interests of effectively delivering the news to their

  audience of more than three thousand in the school system.

  Don’s journalistic background certainly had influenced the approach

  he employed in their morning announcements.

  An Informal Model

  Though informal by comparison, Mark Young’s morning announce-

  ment program on the other side of the country was by no means undisci-

  plined. Everyone had a job to do and these jobs, like those in Don’s

  operation, rotated daily providing Mark’s students exposure to all posi-

  tions in the announcements milieu. Though it was a news-style presenta-

  tion, it was based less on a journalistic model, and more on what could be

  described as an “expressive-democratic” model.

  The morning announcement process at Mark’s Central New York

  high school began at 7:30 a.m., well before most students arrived at

  Resilience

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  school. This was the time period that the news of the day was collected

  from various sources from the main office, to individual teachers and also

  the Internet. On the particular morning we visited, the Internet was down

  and that was a significant problem for this group since they had not yet

  collected what they felt was a sufficient amount of announcement materi-

  al from other sources.

  Mark was calm and poised in dealing with the problem and as the

  countdown to air approached, the Internet showed no signs of recovery

  so the students collected what they could from existing news sources and

  made it work.

  Whereas Don had designed his California video operation to emulate

  a seamless, professional news setting, Mark’s operation was built on a

  more holistic model, to relate to a variety of student abilities and inter-

  ests, inviting them to find comfort with video in their own ways. His

  students exuded more personal style, irreverence, and overall creativity

  in their work because they did not conform to one code or approach to

  video.

  Some of them seemed interested in technology. A handful were inter-

  ested in news. One student showed us her comedy film she had been

  working on which, even though it didn’t fit into the morning announce-

  ment realm, was her contribution to the wider communications organiza-

  tion Mark had created. Others were performers and worked very hard on

  their “act” to impress, and hopefully find fame in, their high school audi-

  ence. In talking with Mark, we discovered that he had, over the years,

  sent our university some of its better entertainment production students.

  In any event, as we watched them pull together the final show, we felt

  like we were watching a presentation of information in this school’s style, based on the personalities and interests of its students, more than a news-cast per se.

 
Morning Announcements as “Local News”

  In considering the concept of morning announcements in the K-12

  experiences, it really could be termed “local news” in its purest form:

  about, by, and for a school community. In considering which side of the

  formal-informal spectrum might work best for video announcement set-

  tings across the country, it is difficult to imagine there is a preferred

  manner or way to do it. Though morning announcements may be univer-

  sal in their K-12 school function, every school is unique in terms of its

  geographical location, administrative, teaching, and student bodies. The

  manner in which morning announcements are approached and present-

  ed therefore depends on the nature and resources of each school. The

  choice of method depends on what model best represents and serves the

  school community.

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  It was truly inspiring to watch these video morning announcements

  produced by the students and their respective teachers. The fact is that

  the idea of local— which seems to rise up effortlessly out of the morning announcements—continues to confound leaders in the communications

  industry. Traditional local news sources—newspapers, television,

  radio—continue to struggle and often fall in the face of meeting unique

  needs of local communities. And thus far this millennium, the idea of a

  consistently successful and reliable truly local news and information

  sources has remained elusive to the touch and control of corporate con-

  trol.

  We often wonder why our journalism colleagues, who prepare the

  next generation of newsmakers for the industry, spend so much time

  teaching their students how to make news like the fast fading local news

  professionals in our medium sized city. In this light it doesn’t seem far-

  fetched to offer college students an exercise from a truly local context that will exercise their ability to face the challenge of delivering local news in the future—say to do the morning announcements for their school.

  And as with any form of news, there is a shelf life to this brand of local

  news. Devon Wood has noticed this in his Colorado school:

  It’s funny, there’s a shelf life to their interest in any video announce-

  ments. The longer something stays on the announcements, we’re talk-

  ing more than three days which seems to be the typical limit—the more

  they will talk over the announcements. But as soon as there is some-

  thing new, they quiet right down and pay attention.

  The point here is certainly not that kids have all the answers adults seek.

  But rather, K-12 environments are fresh and open creation points for new

  and inventive ways of doing video.

  Part Two

  Locks

  Behind the Camera, in Front of the

  Lens: Video and Self-Discovery

  One of the benefits to using video production in the classroom is that it

  invites self-discovery. There are other ways to achieve this, true, but none seem as germane to today’s students as the creation of digital video projects. The significance of video for today’s students cannot be overstated; they are coming of age in a world that is portrayed by an ever-increasing

  source of channels, including film, television shows, and YouTube

  videos. Thus, video has become a key de facto space in which students

  explore, discover, and get to know the world around them. To invite

  them to become a part of this process is to invite them to contribute in a

  language in which many of them already possess a certain degree of

  fluency.

  By introducing learning initiatives that include activities in which stu-

  dents already have vested interests, educators stand to instill further curiosity and interest. Video production, thus, is a natural method for stu-

  dents to make explicit connections between what they’re learning in

  school and their developing interests, lived experiences, and evolving

  social realities outside the classroom. By inviting students to actively

  engage the self in guided pursuits of lesson objectives, school can become a place of simultaneous learning and self-discovery.

  Engaging self-discovery through classroom-based video exercises in-

  vites students to make connections between lesson objectives and their

  own lives. Students charged with the task of creating a video are forced

  to first identify their own relationships with the subject matter. For in-

  stance, a student creating a digital video about a story or book assigned

  for an English class must be actively engaged in interpretation. The act of producing a video about a specific topic requires students to first identify and then to fill in any gaps in their knowledge of the subject in order to

  produce a final project that is coherent and successful according to the

  assigned instructions.

  While such active engagement is also possible in more traditional

  types of schoolwork (for example, essays, research papers, etc.), it is more probable in exercises that invite self-expression, creativity, and, thus, activations of the entire self. By encouraging students to take an active role in their learning, and by allowing students to tailor lessons to forms of

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  Behind the Camera, in Front of the Lens

  expression in which they already have personal investments, the motiva-

  tion to learn may be driven by self-interest rather than the desire to mere-ly receive a good grade.

  TWELVE

  Boundaries

  After two decades of pioneering work in brain research, the education

  community has started to realize that “understanding the brain” can

  help to open new pathways to improve educational research, policies

  and practice.

  —Centre for Educational Research and Education (CERI), 2007

  It is widely known that Albert Einstein credited music as a driving force

  behind his development of the theory of relativity, a result of intuition

  driven by musical perception. If an inference can be drawn from the case

  study of this well-known brain, it is that the human thought process is

  multidimensional. In Einstein’s case, music was a garden for the cultiva-

  tion of a creative scientific idea.

  In our K-12 experiences, we have found that videomaking seems to

  have a similarly transcendent effect, not unlike music, on people who are

  engaged in it, and this can be used to the advantage of learning.

  Suspension of Belief

  In one kindergarten classroom we discovered a very interesting case

  of such transcendence in the making of a movie called Once Upon a Cold-

  heart (Schoonmaker, 2007). Following up on our success in the previous year, the teacher, Mrs. Brighton, wanted to make what she called a “video

  play” to engage her students in the creative process of filmmaking. Like

  other activities in her class, the video play would be recreationally based and create a warm memory for students that they would associate with

  the learning environment of school.

  One of the students brought in an idea from a story she had read with

  her mother called Miss Nelson is Missing. 1 In the story a teacher has some problems with her students’ disruptive behavior and decides to teach

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  them a lesson. She comes to school disguised as a very mean substitute<
br />
  teacher and ultimately makes her students appreciate how good they had

  it with her. Once they learn their lesson, Miss Nelson returns to the class and they behave exceptionally well. They know the evil substitute could

  always return if they were to act otherwise.

  When it came to adapting the story to their particular classroom it

  became clear that the children wanted the story to be truly and believably

  scary to those who watched it. We were impressed with their natural

  ability to envision and relate to a point of view outside of their own. We

  didn’t realize it at the time, but there was a developmental term for this

  particular ability on the children’s part and it was included in their ele-

  mentary school curriculum: Piaget’s (need source) principle of elimina-

  tion of egocentrism in the third concrete operational stage of cognitive

  development. Though Piaget’s principles of cognitive development are

  often talked about in and around classrooms in this district, they are not

  completely embraced given their resident strengths and weakness in ed-

  ucational effectiveness over time. Regardless, this was a term to describe

  children’s ability to comprehend a perspective outside their own, and a

  somewhat advanced skill as far as kindergarten students go.

  They clearly envisioned an audience watching their film, and they

  wanted to scare them. This is why they spent more time developing the

  evil character than anything else. By doing this, they were engaging in a

  fairly sophisticated cinematic process in their management of a viewer’s

  suspension of disbelief. They knew their audience would have limits in

  terms of truly being scared of their fictitious evil character. If they did a good job, their audience would suspend a degree of their disbelief—in

  other words the fact that they were in reality watching a clearly artificial story on a screen, rather than a truly real and in-person event—and let

  themselves be transported into the fantasy of the scary story.

  Little did we know at the time of this creative planning of the film that

  many of the children were engaged in an inverse process: Rather than

  suspending their disbelief, they were actively suspending their belief! In retrospect it makes a great deal of sense that all twenty-five students