Wrapping it all up! And hopefully putting a bow on it!

Yesterday the Oaklawn 5th grade team and I met to plan our Film Festival (to take place May 24th!), which will put a cap on the experience of a lifetime.

It has been an amazing journey to get to this place. We have witnessed profound acts of creativity, inevitable frustration, lack of resources, dwindling timelines, goofiness, necessary stick-to-itiveness, pandemonium and joy - aka all of the ingredients needed for an authentic independent filmmaking process!

I'm really proud of these kids. This was our first crack at this event, and the kids took it from beginning to end: researched a historical figure important to the American revolution, created a seed story using the facts they learned, adapted a screenplay from that story, drew storyboards, recorded audio, filmed their shot sequence, added music and edited their final project together. This is the ultimate inter-disciplinary, project-oriented learning experience. Dynamic and reliant on independence and taking initiative, it stretches the kids beyond their comfort zones in many ways. I have loved witnessing these kids rising to the challenges they face. Some of them lost footage and they all had to work around scarcity when it came to equipment and costumes. We asked a great deal of them in this initial Founding Folks Film Fest 1.0, and can't wait for a crack at 2.0 next year.

Once again, I must voice my gratitude to the teaching team, administration, key community members, and AIM for helping us to achieve our goals. It takes a great deal of organization, generosity, and adventurousness on the parts of many to get a project like this off of the ground.

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!

LAFAYETTE!

Last week zipped by. You know you're invested when you wake up at 4 a.m. obsessing. Or you walk into a tree. That's how the Founding Folks Film Festival has been for me. I've spent so much time planning and being in the moment that I'm relieved to take a few beats to reflect.

The kids are into it. I got to show some of my very favorite films, trailers and shorts - allowing them to look at some new films (a clip from Amelie) and ones they've already seen (Up, The Muppets) but using a new set of eyes. Film is a language of its own. I love to hit this point home, because for so many of us, movies are considered an escape or a guilty pleasure. But kids are learning that film is also the epitome of "show, don't tell," which we talk about with our writing, and that a script looks different from a story for several important reasons. So last week was about introducing these concepts.

After watching film with a critical eye toward elements of narrative and getting a base-level grasp on script format, this week students were introduced (hilariously, I thought) to the biggest, brightest characters to come out of the Revolutionary War. Each teacher and myself had a chance to pitch our war heroes to the crowd, while students took notes as to who they might want to follow up on. We tried to cover not only the big names (Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson) but also some of the lesser known ones - did any of you know that Sybil Ludington rode her horse Star twice as far as Paul Revere to warn about the coming of the British troops? And she was only 16 at the time! Why doesn't she enjoy the same mythology as Revere does?  Hmmmm.....

As kids will be researching with seed stories in mind, today I will play some clips from the musical Hamilton, which does a brilliant job of magically turning historical facts into irresistible tales. Once again, Lafayette will blast-rap his way into infamy, with yet another brand new audience.

GAME

I love the word "game" for its many meanings - particularly that it implies play as well as being up for anything. The 5th grade team at Oaklawn is game. And they've got game. Today we shot "Right Before Paul Revere's Ride," a script I wrote as a teaser for kids who will soon be making their own films, and of course also an opportunity for the team to show off their considerable acting chops.

I have to say that this was guerilla-style filmmaking that could only be pulled off by a teaching team with a 45 minute PLC meeting time available. These people know how to get things done, and can do it in record time while looking reeaallllly good. Teachers don't get enough credit for the daily magic necessary for making silk purses out of sows' ears. I love that this team is willing to look silly and go the extra mile for the sake of fun, meaningful learning for their students. Their kids will never forget this!

*Photo credit Lori Smith

Observing Ms. Kelm and Dr. E

I had the great privilege of observing in Rachel Kelm's second grade classroom as a part of my AIM experience. She and Erika (aka Dr. E) worked on decoding the song "Follow the Drinking Gourd" as a part of (I'm guessing) African American History Month. I was impressed with how engaged the kids were as they determined the hidden meanings from the slave narrative. What struck me most was the warmth of the room, the comfort of the kids in their space, and the obvious love and respect between students and teachers. I was reminded of the charge we have as educators to allow students to find their own way, and to resist the urge to provide answers right away. The music was integral to the lesson, as the kids were  able to hear the song as it was sung so long ago. I learned a great deal watching this successful team in action and appreciate their willingness to allow me access to their room. Thank you!

Who tells your story?

I've been thinking a lot lately about what moves us as teachers, as students, and as human beings. Art keeps me alive - yes, in a metaphorical sense - but it's what keeps my brain engaged, my emotions connected, my dreams aloft. Art commands attention. Art is the unexpected. Art challenges us and at the same time makes learning feel deliciously secret and subversive and surprising and - yes - fun. Art inspires flow: that sense of feeling no time passing. And now that I've tasted the challenge and the pure joy of bringing my passion for my own art into the classroom and watched kids hooked on to my art in their own unique ways it's hard to imagine ever going back.

When I covered the concept of "show, don't tell," which happens to be perfectly encapsulated within the art of film, I used a graphic that feels like a microcosm for everything that we're trying to do in our work with this grant.

We use our unique experience -the lens with which we see the world - to tell our stories. And it is our hearts that inform our best work.

On that note, it's hard to do justice to the impact that the new musical Hamilton has had on my family in recent weeks. My 4th grade son has dived into the Revolutionary War, and written a persuasive essay around how Hamilton has largely been forgotten by history. My husband has brought the story and music into his classroom and within a couple of weeks, hundreds of his eighth graders were writing raps and freestyling. He actually catches them "listening ahead," they're so invested. And I - I awaken at night with the blaze of lyrics strobe lighting through my head. So it is with all of that in mind right now that I close with this quote from genius.com, a commentary on Hamilton's lyrics:

As Aaron Burr notes in “The World was Wide Enough,” “History obliterates in every picture it paints.” You have no control over who tells your story, and after death, your story is all that’s left. What’s left other than the memories we helped make before we exited the stage? What is our ultimate legacy beyond the things we create and the words we leave behind?