Final Blog Post: TMA 680

Simply put, I had two general goals for this class—to become more technically proficient at filming and to develop media-related curriculum for my own classes this coming school year.   Regarding my first goal, I can honestly say that I am more technically proficient at filming than I was before the term started.  Granted, I didn’t have any experience filming at that point, so any acquisition of knowledge was more than I knew before.  I have a ways to go before I’m making movies that I’m satisfied with, but I feel like I’ve been given the tools to improve through repeated practice.  Before the term began, I didn’t have any real experience with cameras; I didn’t know what white balance was, nor did I know how to manually control a camera.  I didn’t know anything about lighting principles or sound editing, and I wasn’t familiar with Adobe Premiere.  While I’m still just touching the surface with all of these things, I'm at least headed in the right direction. 

 My second goal—to develop media-related curriculum for my classes—was a success, with as much credit due to my classmates as to me.  I feel satisfied with the lessons/units I came up with—even before discussing what we would be covering in TMA 680, I wanted to plan a screenplay lesson, a pre-production lesson (storyboarding, for example), and some kind of filming lesson.  We created each of those lesson types, and then some.  I have four times as many lesson plans as my own, though, thanks to Amy, Bob, Emily, and Mindy.  I will not want for ideas this coming school year, either in my English or Film classes.

Circumstances outside of our control—namely the compressed nature of the summer term—could have helped me better achieve these goals.  If this class had been spread out over four months instead of six weeks, we undoubtedly could have spent more time delving into the intricacies of media production instead of hovering at the surface.  With that said, I’m content with what I did learn this term and am excited to continue to learn more about film and media production.

How would I like to see myself in a few years in terms of using production skills for pedagogical purposes?  I would like to get to the point where I’m teaching some of the concepts that seemed difficult to teach, as we discussed in class.  For example, in some of our created assignments (mine included), the end product our students make seem something of a half measure because so much of the production depends on other skills tangential to what we’re teaching.  It would be easy to have a Narrative project turn into an editing project since editing is such a big part of putting together a polished video.  Right now it seems overwhelming to try to teach so much information; with appropriate planning, though, it’s possible. 

A big part of teaching production skills is dependent on the technology that allows for such instruction.  I would like to set my classroom up with the kind of cameras, editing programs, and other equipment that makes this kind of learning possible.  I need to make enquiries about available school funds/grants in order to provide these resources to my students. 

I would like to incorporate production skills in my classroom as a means to further critical thinking.  As we saw this semester, there’s no such thing as learning production skills independently of each other (there probably is, but the result would not be too appealing).  It’s like music—one doesn’t learn how to play an instrument just by practicing scales.  At some point, a musician wants to be able to play songs (application of scales and technique, among other things).  I learned a lot this term about technical aspects of filming, not through isolated exercises but through their application in fiction and non-fiction filmmaking.  I would like to teach the same principles to my students, making additional tie-ins to literacy.   

Updated Project Videos

Composition Assignment

Narrative Assignment

Documentary Assignment

Reflection on Doc Assignment (So Far)

As I was thinking about what I wanted my students to do for a doc assignment, I settled on the idea of having them make a short documentary in conjunction with their job shadow day.  Partly, I wanted to hear some different responses from my students the day after job shadowing besides, “I just sat around all day,” or “I still don’t understand what my parent does.”  I also knew that it would be easy for me to go to my dad’s workplace (a mechanic shop) and record some footage since my car was due for an oil change. 

            I was right about it being easy to take my car in for an oil change like I always do every three months, but I think I overestimated people’s willingness to be on camera.  Granted, the first my dad heard about my filming project was when my mom talked to him on the phone and she mentioned it in passing (which was about 30 minutes before I showed up there with my car and camera), so he didn’t exactly have time to contemplate whether he wanted to do it or not. 

            After I arrived, I talked to my dad for a few minutes and then talked to my two uncles and another co-worker who also work there.  When I asked if I could interview them on camera, only one of them agreed without any apprehension.  I ended up filming the three of them before walking back to my dad’s work area to set up the tripod.  Compared to my uncles, he seemed even more reluctant to be on camera, and when I pressed him just a little, he didn’t cave.  I thought, if he really doesn’t want to be interviewed on camera, I’m not going to make him.  I asked if I could just record him working, and he said yes, so much of the b-roll is of him. 

            Lesson learned: the presence of a camera is scarier to some than I thought it would be.  Like my dad, at least a portion of my students’ parents wouldn’t want to be interviewed on camera, so I would need to include options for whom and what my students could film in the assignment description.  Instead of requiring students to interview a parent for the job-shadow assignment, I might write something like “Interview your parent and/or co-workers to find out more about this business/career.”   

Reflection on Narrative Assignment / Dialogue Editing Exercise (Now Completed)

Starting with the Dialogue Editing Exercise, I feel confident that I'm becoming more proficient with Premiere.  I still have a long ways to go before I feel comfortable with it, but at least now I'm not trying to use it like it's iMovie.  With regard to the filming process (what we did on class last Tuesday), I'm becoming more and more aware of the necessary collective effort behind a movie, even if it's something as small scale as the 10 Things I Hate About You dialogue.  The resulting implications will change the way I approach a project like this.  Group work has been a struggle in my English classes since I began teaching, partly because of the solitary nature of reading and writing.  It seems like I've used group work arbitrarily at times, just to mix things up a bit, even if students could do the same task individually.  On the other hand, group work to create a movie is by no means arbitrary.  When we recorded this exercise in class, each of us had a role, and it would have been very difficult consolidate any two of those roles.  

Speaking of roles, I had the opportunity to inhabit the role of actor for the Narrative Assignment video.  Thanks to my charitable wife--also a non-actor--who was willing to play the part of the landlady, we shot this segment of the short story last week.  Is the resulting video a laughable train wreck?  Mostly, but I feel it was important to make it the way I did.  First, if I expect my students to make something performative/creative, I should show a willingness to do the same, even at the risk of making a total fool of myself.  Second, despite the video's weaknesses, I think it shows what I'm trying to accomplish with this assignment--transfer of knowledge/information from a shooting script to a video shoot.  What I shot was based entirely off the notes I wrote on my screenplay/shooting script.  That's what I'm trying to accomplish with my students, no matter the scale of this unit (I put a note at the end my lesson plans, explaining final assignment options--if I were going all out on this unit in a film class, I would have my students make a video like I did; because of the limited time in an English class, I would have my students turn their shooting script into a Photo Storyboard or even a drawn storyboard to save time).  

Things I will do differently next time?  As you can tell by listening to my Narrative Assignment video, I did not do a very good job with sound; I need to make sure to adjust the settings correctly to avoid the pervasive buzz.  Also, in editing this video, I've heard the dialogue so many times that I believe I could deliver those lines much better now than I did when we recorded, which means that I should have learned the dialogue better in the first place.  Additionally, my video would have benefitted from more extended takes.  At times I had the problem of not having enough footage after certain lines, which made L-cuts impossible when editing a couple parts together.  

Reflection on Narrative Assignment / Dialogue Editing Exercise (So Far)

As I’m at the halfway point in creating my Narrative Assignment and editing the Dialogue Editing Exercise, I’m realizing just how hard it can be to narrow the scope of an assignment to make the objectives clearer.  Along those same lines, it is difficult to find appropriate assessments that don’t require an inordinate amount of prior knowledge or a specific skill set ancillary to what is actually being assessed.  When we discussed what we had in mind for our Narrative Assignments on Tuesday, both Bob and I were to trying to get past certain hurdles with regard to the projects we’re trying to plan for our students.  In Bob’s case, he wants to teach continuity in film (including editing) without becoming completely bogged down in editing.  The problem, as he stated (and I’m paraphrasing), is that it’s kind of hard to separate one (continuity) from the other (editing).  The best way for students to demonstrate an understanding of continuity in film would be to shoot scenes and edit them together, following a rubric like Bob has in his lesson. 

I have a similar problem with my lesson, in that what I want to accomplish with my students might be thwarted by my students’ lack of editing skills and my school’s possible lack of resources.  Because I haven’t taught media to this extent in the past, I don’t know what kind of editing tools are on the school’s computers.  If I find out that we have appropriate tools at school, deciding how much editing to teach would be a different matter.  I would have no problem taking my Film Studies class into the computer lab for multiple class periods to teach them basic editing.  I don’t think I could justify doing that with my English classes, though.  Consequently, this lesson becomes an exercise in writing a shooting script for my English class.  I still think my students could learn some valuable things in this kind of lesson (identifying subtext as they adapt a short story into a screenplay and then a shooting script/essentially directing a movie on paper), but they would be missing out on the full authentic learning experience that my film class would get with this project.  After all, which is better out of these two options: writing a detailed shooting script for a movie that won’t be made (or at least edited together) or writing a shooting script for a movie that will actually be filmed and edited to look like a real movie?  As of right now, my Narrative Assignment is straddling between the Film Studies version (more extensive) and the English class (more scaled back). 

Composition Assignment

While creating the outline for this assignment, I first considered the resources my students and I have, at least for the coming school year.  In future years, I might be able to allocate some funds towards the purchase of class cameras, but for now I think my students will be limited to what they bring to class everyday: their phones.  Consequently, my lesson focused less on some of the technical aspects of composition I would have liked to include.  Instead, they get a unit on framing (with some discussion on rule of thirds and nose room), camera angles, and camera movement. 

My finished video left something to be desired, mostly because my compositions weren’t the prettiest (I don’t know about my manual-exposure skills at this point, either).  Next time, I will spend more time filming, until I get the exact shots I envision; my skill level with some of these techniques (manual controls) will improve as I practice more, too.  I suppose I can have students look for weaknesses in my video and ask them how to improve certain shots compositionally. 

I think my students will probably share some of my struggles.  Visualizing a shot and pulling it off is a difficult task.  Having my students repeatedly practice similar compositional assignments would allow them to make improvements.

Editing Exercise

The idea for our Editing Exercise/Scavenger Hunt was to tell a story about a character trying to pick up a quarter off the ground but to no avail.  As I was editing this, I was a bit worried about not having all of the composition/editing items from the checklist; all of them are listed at some point in the video, but it might be a stretch to say that they're completely accurate.

Reflection on Composition

With Composition, I find myself a little out of my depth, which is good because I have the opportunity to learn a lot about something I knew next to nothing about before.  When we were recording the footage for our Editing Exercise last week, I told Emily that when I take pictures my instincts are to break all of the rules: to center everything, to place the horizon in the middle of a shot, etc.  Granted, my inexperience with photography and shooting video was such that I didn’t know I was breaking any rules.  However, it makes sense that I’ve never been too enamored with anything I’ve shot. 

            I look forward to teaching these composition principles to my future classes (both Language Arts and Film).  One thing that makes English Language Arts tricky (and possibly the reason that so many students don’t like English classes) is the difficulty in making abstract concepts more concrete.  There’s not just one correct way to write, nor is there one correct direction to go in a narrative, argumentative, or expositional paper.  So much freedom seems to overwhelm students, young and old, as writing continues to be an elusive thing for them.  I mention this because it’s always refreshing to teach material that is more concrete/skill-based. 

            True, composing good shots is as much of an art as it is a science, but students should be able to know if they’ve done a shot correctly or not with some immediacy.  When I write objectives up on the white board, I do so with the intention of introducing concepts/skills that students will be able to master in a short period of time, if not after one class period.  That doesn’t always happen with a traditional writing objective (“Students will strengthen a claim with at last two pieces of evidence,” for example).  In a composition assignment, I imagine students understanding the difference between what’s good and bad, simply because they get a clear visual of the examples and they have clear objectives: “Students will compose a shot that follows the rule of thirds,” or “Students will shoot a series of shots that includes a wide shot, medium shot, and close-up.”  I don’t want to undersell/underestimate composition or make it seem easier than it is (after all, I’m still a novice, having become familiar with some of these terms only a week ago), but I do think it is something that will make sense to students.