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By Michael Schoonmaker, Author, Cameras in the Classroom Some months after we had finished making the kindergarten fantasy Coldheart movie, Mrs. Brighton shared some perspectives on the experience, in particular how her students walked the line between reality and fantasy. It was all about the illusion we were manufacturing that the story character Mrs. Brighton (not the real Mrs. Brighton) had an evil twin: When we were filming Coldheart it was fun for me because I remember getting into character—it was the side of Mrs. Brighton that’s never emerged.
We were filming and I was being Mrs. Brighton, and all of a sudden it was time to be Ms. Coldheart. The kids were all sitting together and they saw me carry the dress and wig into the bathroom, and I came out with it on and at least half of them were terrified. Where was Mrs. Brighton? They could not figure out where Mrs. Brighton was and it was just so fun! It’s really learning to understand reality, and separating what you see on video and understanding that video allows you to make lots of things look very, very real. For some kids the concepts are not going to be quite in place developmentally. I think for a lot of the kids it’s so good to start to separate, because I think we’re in an age where kids need to know that what they’re seeing on television is not real.
The most elaborate illusion we created was Ms. Coldheart herself. The most crucial moment in this scene was when both Mrs. Brighton and Ms. Coldheart were to be shown in the same room together. If we could successfully make a viewer believe that there were in the same space at the same time—even though this was impossible since they were the same person—Ms. Coldheart would come to life as a character. This is an example of suspension of disbelief: a term to describe the depth of involvement a viewer is willing to give to a fictional story. When they sit down to watch a movie, audience members go through a preliminary stage of story engagement. First, they take in basic story information and consider whether the story is worth experiencing. Even though they have made a preliminary decision to participate in the story, there still is time to gather information on whether it is the kind of story they might find interesting. They can always walk out of the movie theater or change the channel, depending on how they feel about the story. At about the same time, viewers eye the authenticity of a fiction story. They ask, “Is it believable?” or “Is it a complete fabrication?” Believable stories are preferred as a rule because we usually prefer to surrender our imaginations to the story and let it take us away as viewers. Storytellers must therefore prepare their stories for such viewer demands. This usually means we have to get to the point of the story quickly, usually by beginning with some sort of action. Action encourages participation in the story, because it moves like our lives. And our stories and characters have to be believable and authentic if viewers are going to relate to them as if they were real people. If viewers are sufficiently engaged in a story as they seek information and authenticity in it, then we can expect that they will suspend their disbelief in the artificial act of, among other things, watching a story unfold on a clearly artificial screen and they will join in the story experience as if it was an event in their lives. This is almost a form of self hypnosis story audiences go through so that they can leave behind the complicated real life ambience of movie theaters and living rooms surrounding them as they watch, and just enjoy the stories in front of them. Though a fairly complex story process, it is also fairly innate, even in young children. Reading books also requires a degree of suspension of disbelief. A good book will make readers forget about the environment they’re actually reading in and transport them to imaginative lands of their stories. Reading stories in print doesn’t require the same kind of suspension of disbelief as a video story. This is because words trigger the mind’s eye to illustrate for them. Many reading enthusiasts cite this as a reason why reading book stories is better for children than “reading” moving-image stories. “All the imagination is taken away from the reader,” they say. Even though videomakers do offer more visual cues for their readers, there is no less need for imagination. In short, videos are only pieces of picture and sound information that must be linked together to form a whole idea that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is just a different way of using reader imaginations. Video has a relatively high suspension of disbelief factor, meaning that we have to pay more attention to authenticity and devise clever illusions of reality because life through a video camera looks a lot like everyday life. The closer to real life a media form looks, the more demanding it is to uphold the suspension of disbelief. A theatrical performance on a stage has a much more tolerant suspension of disbelief and therefore does not require the same attention to detail that film stories do. If a woman dances across a stage singing “I am the wind.” We might give her the figurative benefit of doubt since theater often involves a higher level of abstract expression. We don’t have the same luxury in a movie. This is why we didn’t just say that Mrs. Brighton had an evil twin. And it might not be enough to just see the twins in completely separate shots. We had to show the evil twin in the same space with Mrs. Brighton so that viewers would “believe” they were actually twins. First we shot a close-up shot of Mrs. Brighton sitting down on a chair at the front of the classroom, talking to the kids about her sister. We followed this up with reactions of some children looking at her while she talked. Then we went back to Mrs. Brighton on a slightly longer shot to show that someone in a dark dress was standing next to her. Only the torso of this person was visible. It was actually Mrs. DeBella, the assistant teacher of the class. She was being used as a “body double” for Ms. Coldheart. Then as Mrs. Brighton looked up at her sister, we followed with a shot of several kids shifting from looking at Mrs. Brighton in a chair, to the standing figure above her eye level. This was followed by the payoff shot, camera tilting up like the children’s eyes to reveal Ms. Coldheart. Because of another pair of cinematic phenomena—“persistence of vision” and “montage”—the illusion of Ms. Coldheart was complete with this lineup of shots. This is because viewers inductively create meaning out of individual shots by blending and relating them as they come up on the screen. Mrs. Brighton and I were truly exploring the line between the fantastic and the real with these young videomakers, and promoting the idea the imagination was a fun place to be both as consumers and authors of stories.
Something very interesting and unexpected happened when the children sat down to watch their completed movie: some of them actually believed it! Mrs. Brighton explained: When we sat down to screen it, some of the children actually wondered whether the story was true even though they had witnessed it. “Was that really you?” one asked. I actually believe there were some kids who graduated from kindergarten that year who thought Ms. Coldheart might be real.
Mrs. Brighton saw a parallel between this unexpected finding and a Kindergarten math concept called “conservation.”
Here are five pennies. If I close my hand and hold them over here how many are in there now? …some of them don’t have that concept. But it’s going to be exactly the same because I haven’t taken one away. Conservation would be that if you have any number of objects, they could count and were able to conceptualize that number 7 or 3 or whatever, and then you cover it up or even put it behind your back, is the number the same? Or you can switch them to the other hand and say, “How many are in my hand now?” and they may not know that it’s the same. They will need to count them again. But I think it’s a similar [with viewers]…and when they’re ready, it occurs.
But as I compare it I think of the very similar thing, put a dress and a wig on Mrs Brighton and they wonder if she’s the same. But I wonder if it correlates in their development…if those would be the same kids who couldn’t do that. …It’s the kind of thing that will come with experiences and, I guess we do work on it because we want to provide them with experiences, but it’s just like learning a motor function…you can’t make a child walk until he’s ready.
I still think there were kids that could never quite figure out if that was me or not. Mrs. Debella was next to Mioshi who kept saying, “That’s not Mrs. Brighton, that’s not Mrs. Brighton, that’s not Mrs. Brighton,” and you wonder … if she needed to convince herself that Mrs. Brighton couldn’t get up there and be that mean, or that the wig and the dress transformed me enough, that she was either talking herself into or out of something? But she was reciting this little idea underneath and I thought that was really interesting …but I think for some of them it was kind of real. Even the next day I recall some questions like, “Was that really you?”
What to do with the K-12 imagination? Imagination is like an expansion chamber for the classroom—a virtual learning environment reserved for everything from difficult issues to pure play—just a different educational venue: Teachers are ideally situated to help kids make sense of the real world, and even difficult issues: everything from death and dying, current events and TV and movie stories. Pat Kippling elaborated on this idea, suggesting that we need to give children more credit for their ability to handle everything from “the truth” to very complex ideas. If we don’t, others will: Maybe because we, as a society, are so idealistic about children and their innocence, we have ignored their genuine curiosity about the BIG questions about life and death. In ignoring it, we have created a vacuum that is being filled, not be people genuinely interested in our children's healthy development or in sharing their own insights but smart enough to identify a need and fill it to meet their own needs - profit. But it’s not simply delineating the line between real and fantastic. It’s also about learning to appreciate and celebrate the worlds of each. Videomaking allows us to get us inside the playground of imagination where we can stand in each others’ shoes, share feelings, share understandings, share differences, and get to know ourselves and each other better. As Mrs. Brighton related, video was a doorway for new experiences and lessons:
They loved it! They wanted to see it again except some were scared of it. Ms. Coldheart was so convincing and effective that they were a little frightened. It made it easy because I could always say, “You know, Ms. Coldheart might stop by tomorrow. I think we should be good.
Michael Schoonmaker is Chairman of the Television-Radio-Film Department at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, and author of the book, Cameras in the Classroom: Education the Post-TV Generation. . He began his production career with MTV, then joined NBC’s Olympic production unit. He has taught television and filmmaking courses at the University for twenty years, and worked with K-12 teachers and students for the past fourteen. |
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Suspending Belief: Walking the Tender Line Between Fantasy and Reality |
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September, 2008 |
