That sound you hear? It's the rubber hitting the road.

My submersion in the FFFF is now complete. Kids are MAKING FILMS now, and it is UTTER PANDEMONIUM. Redcoats and wigs flying, patriots emoting in front of green screens, bonnet negotiations - I'm just going to say it:  if you haven't seen 70 fifth graders in the process of making short films you basically haven't really lived. And you may still have a shred of your sanity left. I think the teaching team and I are wading into trickier waters, because logistically, this is navigation of the nimblest order.

That said, this feels exactly like what Michael Jordan calls "flow." Time whips by relentlessly. There are not enough hours. Not. Enough. Hours. The messiness of this final piece of the project, for me, is tempered by how amazing this process has been for the kids. They've taken a piece of history from seed story to film, and it's used every part of their brains. They've become experienced problem solvers and are learning to work smart. Because there's never enough time to get it all done, and artistic visions, while not something you want to compromise, sometimes need tweaking in order to get it done. I'm proud of the kids, and ever grateful to the teaching team and others who are stepping in to make this a reality. We're collectively learning all kinds of important lessons!

Filmmaking: Problem Solving 101

I've often said that filmmaking is 1/2 beautiful artistic expression and 1/2 good old fashioned problem solving. This makes it a perfect fit for a child's - heck an adult's - education. As I watched the following clip on the guy responsible for the special effects on Game of Thrones, it kept coming up, time and time again: problem solving. The show's creators look at world building for the next season and they throw him a series of scenes they're going to need, and his job is to figure out how to get it done. I love this. The clip is worth watching simply for that message.

Game of Thrones: Behind the VFX

This connects well to Paul Tough's assertions in his excellent book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. He argues that learning is not about stuffing a child with facts, but rather:

The persistence and curiosity bits are the one I'm most interested in when it comes to my particular art form. If we're scheduled to shoot today and it's raining but our scene doesn't call for rain - or vice versa - how do we work under these circumstances? 

An interesting problem kids are working to solve that's specific to our situation with the Founding Folks Film Festival is that some of them want to write scripts about duels - very tempting, especially with characters like Burr and Hamilton being researched - but will need to figure out how to film without guns. I'm working to help students to see this not so much as a problem to solve but an opportunity to create a piece of art in a completely new way - possibly a way we've never seen before. It's always fun to recall the shark dilemma in Jaws - Steven Spielberg had a good script and a malfunctioning animatronic shark. So what did he do? He made our imaginations a vital part of the process. We never saw much of the shark, but somehow I was still terrified to get into a bathtub after seeing the film. What sorcery took place there? It was brilliant - and something we hadn't seen before. 

I'm looking forward to moving into storyboarding this week! The process is all!