April 14th,
Today was beautiful in the South Bronx. As we walked to class the roaring crowd at Yankee Stadium could be heard from the Grand Concourse, the sun breaks through, new leaves on the trees bright green, everyone bustling about. Our lesson plan was to take the girls out for a technical shooting lesson and have the boys stay in and edit. To our surprise this is exactly what they wanted to do!
After an icebreaker Flannery, Hanna and I led Shakirah, Ivy and Allison outside. Since the girls had missed the technical lesson earlier in the semester, we needed to catch them up. They learned fast and were soon bracing the camera, panning slow, and holding steady at the beginning and end of a pan. I asked them to frame a single shot using their fingers, then practice bracing the camera against a tree, sign, fence, or the ground, to make a super steady shot. Then we did a pan where I asked them to frame two shots they liked, then brace, and make a slow pan between the two.
This method of combining instruction with hands-on doing worked really well. Soon they were shooting, and we could immediately watch the shots on camera and critique. This worked great - instead of making a technical mistake (like a too-fast pan or a cropped head) and waiting for classroom critique, the on-camera viewing let the students rapidly learn how to make good technical shots.
Their creativity took off from here. Immediately the three of them literally ran off in different directions to find shots they liked near the school - the three of us hustled after! The only guidance I gave the girls for subject matter was to find a frame that looks nice, and practice the two technical shots. I wanted their aesthetics to be uncorrupted by principles of design, and their subjects to be purely their own interest.
Ivy walked to the edge of the schoolyard and began shooting toward the basketball court, bracing on the fence, shooting through the fence, holding, then panning slowly left. As she panned the fence moved out of her frame and she paused at the end of her shot to show the paved schoolyard with the tall apartments beyond, still bracing with her elbow on the fence. "I don't like basket ball," Ivy said, showing me her footage and asking for critique. "The boys swear too much."
"Do you want to find another subject?" I ask.
"No," she says, "I'm just a little bit scared of the ball."
"Come on," I encourage, "lets ask them if we can take a closer shot."
Our next spontaneous lesson was on shooting permission. After a little coaxing, Ivy asked the boys and they agreed. Then we worked on framing a medium shot of the whole court. She made one shot, sitting down, bracing on her knee. We looked at it, and I pointed out that we couldn't see the basketball hoop. So she framed a second shot aiming up a tad, with the hoop now in the corner and the boys playing on the court in the rest of the frame. Satisfied, our next shot lesson was action.
"Come on lets get right in the action now," I say. Ivy resisted at first, not wanting to get hit by the ball. She overcame her fear and soon got some great shots from right under the rim. She learned how to follow the ball, and anticipate when peak action is about the happen. And most importantly to watch the game and the camera at the same time.
Our final lesson was interviews. Ivy made two, one with a player and one with a girl on the sideline who happened to be a cheerleader. Ivy did an awesome job. Her curiosity drove one question after another, until she and the cheerleader were talking about the competitive energy on the sideline of a basketball game, and how sometimes that energy makes her want to fight but she tries to focus that energy into her cheerleading moves because she respects her coach and the rules of the game.
Published by Scott Miller
April 8th,
We had a very good class today. After being held back by various obstacles, like suspensions, kids not showing up for class and snow days, we seem to be back on track. It was a beautiful sunny day in the South Bronx and we made the very smart decision of spending most of the day filming outside. I think we need to spend more time on filming outside with the kids and we should probably have started this much sooner in the program. The positive aspects of walking besides the kids when they are filming is that you get a hands-on teacher-student dynamic, because you are talking with the students while they are trying out the techniques you’ve been teaching in class. It also helps the kids to break down barriers when it comes to walking around their community with film cameras and interviewing people. We thought in the beginning that we could just show them a video letter, teach them a few concepts and then give them cameras to go out and film, but it takes more, like making them comfortable with the actual filming. They were very insecure in the beginning about what to film, and whether a situation was important enough to film or not. The story goes that we asked them to film anything they wanted to film, which ended with suspensions because someone filmed fights in the schoolyard. This again taught us the importance of addressing how one can portray violence in a positive way, and that we as facilitators should have done that from the very beginning.
Back to today and how one can look at it through the lens of Paulo Freire. The kids are clearly working to become active citizens in the process of interviewing other fellow citizens on the street. And the great thing about asking people questions is that you open up dialogue and communication between people that might normally just pass each other on the street without sharing a single thought. And by talking with each other one usually sheds light on some commonality, as a concern or a good idea. For example today, when a man started to talk about how sad he was to see the old Yankee stadium being torn down. This conversation is important to have because if enough people start to talk about a certain thing, social change might happen through what Paulo Freire refers to as raising critical awareness in a community. It is also about literacy and how to read ones own community and the people in it. By opening up dialogue and talking with people one learns more about the various conversational topics in a community, as well as its needs and worries, this knowledge is essential in order to know what to change.
Published by Christoffer Næss
March 15
Personal Reflections:
In his first clip, Willie addressed the camera with honesty and described in a few carful words his concern for violence at school. The second clip showed two older boys fighting out front, one punch landing with a crack. The next several clips showed Willie as a bystander to another boy's bullying, which ran the gamut from fun to abusive. Mr. De Castro suspended Willie for handing in these clips, deeming him an active participant in the bullying.
I understand Mr. De Castro's reasoning: from the School's perspective, they need to punish anyone who participates in a violent incident. Nonetheless I am very disappointed. Our project asked Willie and the others to film their lives by showing things in their community that concern them and showing things they value. Willie followed our instructions, and got in trouble because of it. This is our fault. We had no strategy for how to handle the filming of illegal activities. We didn't think about the legal issues surrounding fighting at school.
We also didn't think about the issue of kids uploading illegal stuff onto u-tube. We think we are "empowering" them by giving them cameras and teaching documentary techniques, but we could just as easily put them in danger if someone they film/upload doesn't want to be publicly shown, and comes after them because of it.
So our strategy for handling these issues begins with 1) understanding the perspective of our sponsoring organization (school) on illegal activities. We need to know how they will react in order to give our students clear guidelines and protect them from unnecessary punishment. Then 2) we should include an early lesson on the power of documentation in the u-tube era. 3) we need a protocol for receiving the videos, reviewing them, and making them public only after we deem the content to be un-harmful for the student, for the subjects, and for the sponsoring org. 4) If the content is potentially harmful, first we need to talk about the issue with the student, then we need to advocate for the student with the sponsoring org. 5) then we need to incorporate what they are filming into our lessons.
A second strategy thread: We are not working hard enough to get to know the students by reviewing what they film. We should be helping them by 6) building their assignments around what they are interested in filming (as shown in their clips), and 7) giving constructive critique of their camera techniques based on reviewing their footage.
Reflections through Paulo Freire:
Freire's Transformative Pedagogy begins with self-knowledge, or knowing "where the students are". The student must know herself in order to transform herself. The teacher must work with the student to help her get to know herself, express herself, define herself. The outside pressure to change is less important than the internal pressure to change. The danger lies in pressuring yourself to change without knowing yourself. In this case we deceive ourselves into thinking the pressure to change comes from within, when really it comes from without--always a questionable source of motivation. Do we really want to dress like that, talk like that, act like that? Or is someone telling us how to be? Who is the outside voice? Advertisers, Religion, parents, who? Do we trust the outside voice to motivate us in the best direction for our own well-being? Or does the outside voice have ulterior motives?
Our initial assignments are focussed around getting to know the self in different ways: "self-portrait without showing your face" has opened some creative ways of self-exploration for our students, such as Shakira interviewing her little brother about herself, or ----- showing some of his favorite family photographs and talking about why they are important.
Published by Scott Miller
