Teaching Filmmaking Empowering Students Through Visual Storytelling

TEACHING FILMMAKING

EMPOWERING STUDENTS THROUGH VISUAL STORYTELLING

By Rosanne Limoncelli, PhD

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Rosanne Limoncelli on Smashwords

Teaching Filmmaking

Empowering Students Through Visual Storytelling

Copyright 2011 By Rosanne Limoncelli

ISBN 978-1-4659-3311-9

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This book is dedicated to my husband,

for all his patience and love.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reading and Writing

Studying the Experience

Connecting to Story as a Reader

Thinking About Thinking

Story and Self

The Method

Active Learning

Action Research

Teaching Visually: The Curriculum

Freewriting

Day by Day

Putting it Together: The Study

Getting Ready

Week One – The Basics

Week Two – The Practice Run

Weeks Three and Four – The Final Projects

The Final Screening and Saying Goodbye

Conclusions

Bibliography

Reading and Writing

When my supervisor, the Dean of a film school, first approached me and asked if I’d like to co-teach a class of high school students on how to make movies, I jumped at the chance. I had completed my BFA in Film & TV several years ago and had still kept my hand in making short films and videos. Since finishing my masters in English Education (teaching reading, writing and media) and beginning the consecutive Ph.D. in the same program, I had put off much idea of teaching again for a while. But at this point my course load was done, and it was time to start thinking about my dissertation. What was that going to be about?

I had found myself reading many texts about story, over the last few years, and books about how we learn through using story. This theme never ceased to fascinate me. While studying how to teach reading and writing I was constantly thinking of the parallels between that type of teaching and teaching filmmaking. There were so many similarities. With my background in filmmaking and all my studying on teaching reading and writing, I was increasingly interested in teaching visual storytelling; what happens when we learn through visual stories? How do the two things, story and visual media, connect?

When the Dean offered me this opportunity, I began to research what kind of curriculum would be appropriate for high school students. I saw immediately that this class would make an ideal setting for my research. What happens when students are asked to learn through visual storytelling? What happens to the teacher? What happens in the class?

The class would take twenty-eight students and would be held for four weeks during the summer. The students would come to New York and live in the college dorms. We could choose sophomores and juniors from high schools all over the world. My Dean and I wanted to enlist an experienced film/video teacher from the ranks of our full time faculty to co-teach. I looked around at the teachers in our community, and found a Professor who had taught high school students in a summer program in the past.

We told him about the program that we wanted to put together and he was very enthusiastic. We talked about working with high school students, what equipment they would need, and what would work in a four-week program. He had good ideas, but more importantly for me, his philosophies about pedagogy seemed in line with mine. He believed in letting the students learn from doing, in the importance of their freedom to express themselves and the significance of each student’s success in their efforts. I told him about my interest in researching students who were learning through visual storytelling, and he was amenable to the idea of participating in the research. We decided that we could work together on this project and planned several curriculum meetings.

Talking about the class with him made me think more about what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to create an experience for the students that would nurture their creativity and their confidence to believe in what they were doing. There was great potential to empower their creative and critical thinking through this class and I wanted to focus on elements that would encourage that. I wanted to challenge them so that they would have a chance to apply those skills. I wanted to create a safe place, where they would feel free to express themselves and to discover their own voice. I wanted to find out what they needed and help them give themselves what they wanted.

My research would focus on the experience of four students in the class as well as my own experience as the teacher. In a class on how to make visual stories on video, there are many opportunities to foster empowerment. Images are everywhere today; the moving image is our new literature. Learning how to read and write the image is as vital as learning the written word in our society today. If we do not learn how to read images, and how to make them ourselves, the images will manipulate us. The moving image is a powerful language, one that many students have already begun to translate. Students, who can read images and create their own sequences to illustrate meaning, will be the powerful artists, the advertisers, the business executives and the teachers of tomorrow.

In a visual storytelling class the students find and discuss meaning in images and scripts, and then they make scripts and images of their own on video. The class works with images very much in the same way that an English class works with text. The class studies different texts and then they experiment by making texts of their own. Questions are asked, discussed and answered. How will you tell this story through visual images? How have others done so similarly? How can it be done most effectively to give the desired effect for this project?

Many students have already tried to make their own videos, many of these videos end up more like plays that are recorded from the back of the room. There is more to filmmaking than making up a story and turning on a camera. What does the director decide to do to make someone understand his/her images? How can the camera direct meaning? How can you visually record a character or place to give you the details of a story without using words? How can we teach students how to experiment with and master these techniques?

When a student makes a story through moving images, it is a form of expression and communication. The meaning of the moving image goes two ways. The filmmaker fills the screen with images and the viewer makes meaning from the images. Like any art form, the viewer takes a visual story from the screen that is never exactly the same one that the filmmaker intended. But that is the beauty of it. The communication between the filmmaker and the viewer is a dialogue, or in Louise Rosenblatt’s term a transaction.

Learning how to read a moving image text can be a self-directed task for a student. In a filmmaking class, students study the excerpts from films that illustrate scriptwriting and filmmaking (text). When they are allowed to voice what they see in those clips, what meaning those images have for them, their comments and discussions can cover everything.

When teaching such a class, I don’t have to tell them anything, only ask them questions to challenge them to think deeper and occasionally repeat their answers using film terminology to broaden their filmmaking vocabulary. In a class of twenty-eight they see every piece of the story, every political implication, every detail of every character. I ask them to elaborate on what they have to say, to dig deeper to comprehend and interpret the visual language. I ask them how the image gave them information, how the director or screenwriter pointed them in that direction. I may fill them in on the time and place of the film or the background of the filmmaker or screenwriter. But I do not have to tell them the meaning of the images. They find them all. I can see them gain confidence as they share their thoughts with the class. In the classroom, every student’s reading of an image is acceptable and valid. Anyone else may agree or disagree. The image is meant to be read.

Writing a movie is more challenging. What shall I write about? What do I want to say? How do I do it? The writing process of creating a screenplay is as important as the technical process of making a video. How to start, how to flesh it out, how to decide on the images? All challenging work yet extremely satisfying when they look up on the screen and see the powerful moving images they have created themselves.

The film editing process is as much a screenwriting process as putting pen to paper. How to arrange those images that may or may not be exactly what you had in mind when you wrote about them. How to find the rhythm of the edits, which shot goes where and for how long? How to smooth out the rough edges, how to polish it, how to end it?

The decisions that a student has to carry through, the self-directed path that a student must take, are all challenging and satisfying. To make something from beginning to end, to enlist your fellow students and communicate your vision, to end up with a movie that you have created and that others can watch and understand is a thrilling adventure. Creating a visual story that comes from within, that says something about who you are, that results in a series of moving images that may move others to tears or make them laugh, is an empowering experience.

How does this happen? How does a class like this work? What is the experience of the students in a visual storytelling class? What is the experience of the teachers? What is the learning transaction between the students and the teachers? What are the most important elements in the experience?

Communicating is something that took me many years to learn how to do with confidence. My school experience seemed to squelch rather than nurture my self-esteem. Anytime I voiced my thoughts or tried to use my own voice in class or homework assignments (instead of regurgitating what the textbook or the teacher had said) the feedback I received was negative. This negative feedback caused me to lose faith in my own ideas and my own thought process. More tragically, it pushed me away from thinking for myself. Anything that was put in front of me was meant to be believed, memorized and regurgitated. I got used to thinking what I was told to think, believing what I was told to believe. I was trapped in a cycle of dis-empowerment. It took me many years to gain confidence in my own ideas and to feel that my thoughts, words and feelings about any subject were valid, important, and meaningful.

Years of those negative experiences could have emptied my mind of curiosity, but somehow I still wanted to learn how to do my own thinking. It took a long hiatus from school, and the reemergence of the power of my inner curiosity, to help me figure out how to think for myself. I discovered that I had to find my own voice before I could really believe in myself. I had spent half my life trying to figure out what I wanted to say and the other half trying to find a way to say it. It was learning visual storytelling through film and video that finally gave me the tools I needed.

When I entered film school to work toward an undergraduate degree, I discovered that there was so much more to visual storytelling than I had imagined. Not only could I tell a story in a film, I could enlarge the idea to encompass many stories. I could show points of view, use imagery, juxtapose ideas and most interestingly of all, let the viewer discover their own meaning of what was going on. They could see and hear my point of view, yet make what they wanted to out of it and come away feeling a part of the story. This is what I liked most about the best films I saw, and it is what I aspired to do myself.

Visual storytelling has been the most inspiring way for me to communicate and express myself. It has helped me to develop my voice, to learn how to explain what was bubbling inside me and to be able to express my thoughts and ideas as I imagined them. The self-confidence I have built through studying and making films and videos has been invaluable to my growth as a student, a teacher and an adult.

Learning filmmaking requires learning how to work well collaboratively. When making a film, it is almost impossible to do it alone. You need a crew of people to help with the camera, lighting, and design, and, in addition, the actors who help to breathe life into the story. Learning how to describe a story to these people before making a film is one of the most important skills in filmmaking. If you cannot communicate to others what your motivation and your vision are, your film will not be a success. Every experience writing a script and working with a crew is an exercise in thinking critically. In order to be able to explain your story, you must be able to understand it well yourself, and then you are more able to describe it.

An important part of my undergraduate education and professional career in filmmaking was learning the communication process. One of the biggest benefits has been the development of my writing ability. I had trouble thinking of myself as a writer when I was in high school. I had too many red marks on my papers and too many critical (but not supportive) comments from writing teachers. When I began to study filmmaking, it brought me to story writing.

Story writing was my first positive writing experience. I found that I longed to write stories, and write them well. So much so that I would write for hours at a time, working to perfect a story, revising it over and over. This was a far cry from my high school days when I would scribble one draft of a paper before handing it in. But after getting involved in visual storytelling, I would practice the craft and work on my technique until I was confident that I was telling my ideas in a way that would be crystal clear to someone else. Being able to use my own voice, my own ideas and narratives gave me a connection to writing that will never leave me. No matter what kind of writing I am doing now, I put the effort and pride into it that it takes to make it what it should be. This is something that was missing throughout my earlier school years.

When I finished my BFA in film, I realized that writing had been my favorite part of my education. This surprised me considering my less than positive secondary educational experience, but I felt secure in the fact that I was a writer, and went on to get my masters and doctorate in teaching reading, writing and media.

Studying the Experience

Today we have so many new ways of telling stories. Visual storytelling is not new, but the study of it is still in its infancy. So much of the world is barraged with visual images and learning how to think critically about these images is imperative. If we do not learn how to understand these images, we are doomed to believe everything we are told (what we see). Teaching our students how to think critically and creatively through visual storytelling must be part of the new millennium. Those that know how to manipulate us through images will have the power. Our students who do not know how to process these images will be at a great disadvantage. They need to be empowered through visually literacy.

The question is, in this age of literacy when everyone must learn to read and write, and interpret visual images, how can learning through visual