M. and I are hard at work on our summer workshop, which we’re privately thinking of as “Personal Essay Filmmaking, 2.0.” Last year at this time, we were trying to guide our students through the incredibly complex task of crafting a short personal essay film in two weeks. This was complicated by any number of factors: mis-advertised course times and dates and lack of lab space being two of the unexpected ones. On top of that, there were all of the difficulties of teaching a class for the first time, and team-teaching for the first time, to boot. In short, it’s amazing that we—and the students—made it out alive.
This time around, however, we’ve streamlined the class considerably. Based on our recent research, we’re also actively thinking about YouTube as a space in which personal essay films already exist, in a variety of manifestations. For the last two days, we’ve been reading personal essays with the class, and using the written text as a starting place to discuss genre, and then we’ve moved on to examining a number of YouTube videos. We’re keeping Jenkins and Juhasz in mind here, but we’re also asking our students to take seriously the potential to produce a personal film with larger societal/cultural meaning. As if that isn’t setting the bar, try this one: they only have two weeks to do it. (!)
My job in class tomorrow is to provide for them a handful of filmmaking techniques that will spur their creative process, and give them some ideas about the visual and aural possibilities available to them. I’ve been assembling clips for the past hour, trying to decide which might be the most relevant to the types of stories they want to tell, but let’s face it: the language of film is infinite, and our time in class is shockingly limited. The task of giving them an abbreviated toolbox of film techniques (and by this, I’m thinking particularly about shots, editing effects, etc.) is a bit like asking someone to build a house, but being told that they can only have three tools with which to do it. A hammer, nails, and a saw? A wrench, pliers, and PVC pipe? Point of view camera, or low angle shot? Non-diegetic sound, or discontinuity editing?
I can’t help but be reminded of the advice of dissertation advisors everywhere: you should have three different versions of your project on tap at any given moment—the 500 word version, the 200 word version, and the 25 word version. Tomorrow, by necessity, we’ll be going with the 25 word version of film techniques. Perhaps there will be time at the end of the week for a longer version.
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