Story Shorts Review: Media and Literacy
Film - a language the young understand
Joe Brian knew that his pupils got into film at a very early age and were sophisticated viewers. But even he was surprised at how well they responded to a package of film 'shorts'.
As literacy coordinator, I must open a hundred packages a year that promise to make my teaching more exciting or more meaningful. Most of these go straight into the bin; but occasionally something arrives that really does offer a new approach, and the bfi Story Shorts are a perfect example of this.
Film, either at the cinema or on video, is the currency of the young. The Y3 children I teach have an extensive knowledge of what is available, and they are far more likely to talk about film than they are about video games, books, football, television, pop or schoolwork. Children get into film at a very early age, and they collect and re-watch films to an extent unknown amongst adults. Typically, children in my school will own up to 100 videos and will make sure that they see new film releases in the week they come out. They are sophisticated viewers as well, enjoying favourites time and time again but rejecting those that don't come up to the mark.
My fellow Y3 teacher, Gayl Jackson, and I like to think of ourselves as go-ahead literacy teachers, and prior to receiving this bfi compilation of five shorts we had already used film twice this year at school. When we were reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to our classes, we watched a video version of the story; and we also watched a video of the film Snow White and compared the Disney treatment of the story with the original. However, we hadn't gone so far as to use a film separately from a written text at this point, and I don't think that the National Literacy Strategy offers any encouragement to do this. So, I was very pleased to have a bfi-produced pack, as it lent academic weight to the idea of using a film text as the focus for literacy work.
The bfi pack
The five films on the bfi video are: El Caminante (1997; 5 minutes), Second Helpings (1999; 8 minutes), Growing ( 1994; 5 minutes), Mavis and the Mermaid (2000; 14 minutes), and Train of Thought (1985; 3 minutes). There is also a 64-page teaching guide which gives background information about each film, introduces and explains a film vocabulary that it encourages the teacher to use, and finally offers suggested lesson outlines from Year 3 Term 1 to Year 6 term 1, showing how the video can be used in school.
I watched the films at home alone in order to plan a week's literacy lessons around them. My first thought was that they were so unlike anything that the children were likely to have seen before that they might receive an instant rejection. I then watched them with my two daughters, aged four and two, and found out that my fears were groundless; indeed, judging from both the laughter and the questions, I appreciated that they would be thought-provoking as well as amusing to the children in my class.
El Caminante (The Traveller) is a drawn animation, which means that each second of film consists of 25 slightly different drawings that appear to make figures move. The traveller is a tightrope walker, and the film depicts the effect he has on a quiet village as he makes a daring walk above a deep chasm. At one stage, he drops his balancing pole, and the villagers gasp at the danger. The film gripped powerfully enough for our two classes to be holding their breath with anxiety. The traveller completes his feat, leaves the village, and life continues, although children now play balancing games instead of the games of football that they played before.
The story is lovely, but what is also great from a teacher's point of view is that so many different things are going on within five minutes, and these provoke questions. Why did El Caminante choose the little girl to hold his cloak? Is El Caminante in real trouble on the highwire, or is it all part of the performance? Why do the crowds disappear so suddenly at the end of the show? And so on.
Second Helpings is filmed using model animation in the style of 'Wallace and Gromit'. It concerns a young Irish girl called Yvonne who dreams of being a supermodel but is at the same time defeated by her own self-loathing. She views herself as fat — seeing a mirror image that is twice her own size — and is further troubled by a sister who refers to her as 'fatbum' and an extended family who love to eat and eat. The Irish accent is very strong, but it doesn't detract from this wonderful story.
The girl finds her own catwalk audience in the course of the film by dressing in her First Communion dress and parading for the dinner guests while they fill the room with flash photography and choruses of approval. She overcomes her self-loathing, and even though she has a moment of embarrassment when she tucks her dress into her knickers, she has become strong enough to laugh this off.
Again, a lot happens in these eight minutes. Our classes were able to grapple with quite complex issues, such as why the director of the film showed a reflection of Yvonne that was so large. They also understood quite clearly that it was Yvonne's attitude that changed in the course of the story, and that she didn't need to lose weight in order to be happy.
Growing uses the same technique as El Caminante: drawn animation. It shows the growing and harvesting of vegetables, condensing the whole process into five minutes of film. It has a very strong soundtrack that makes use of natural sounds such as rain falling or leaves peeling back. The teaching guide quotes a Y6 literacy coordinator saying that she got her best ever poetry from her class after using this stimulus. The sounds are so strong and evocative and the images so compelling that it almost requires a viewer to fill in the narrative with a corresponding lyricism. Children of all ages would respond well to it.
Mavis and the Mermaid , at 14 minutes, is the longest of the films. It really is a delight, with a cast that includes Eric Sykes as Skip, an old sailor, and Sylvia Syms as Gioga, the mermaid. I mention the casting to show the quality of the acting. The two actors play characters with depths of sadness and cynicism that require considerable skill to portray. And the child, Mavis, played by Alyx Petre, who is young, hopeful and innocent, counterbalances the two veterans.
The film is a fairy tale in that it begins 'Once upon a time', has a magical element including the granting of three wishes, has a mermaid, and has a marriage and a 'happy ever after' ending. At the same time, it is grittily realistic, with its setting of Barrow in Furness, fish fingers and baked beans for tea, bullying in the supermarket, and a child mourning her mother's death from cancer.
It has become clear to me that one of the signatures of a good short film is that every image serves a function and that there is no waste. This is particularly true of this film. Mavis is first seen in the supermarket by Gioga. There, she is dancing to herself, showing her aloneness but also her self-possession. Then, she is pushed by an older girl, showing us just one way in which she is an alien in the environment (as Gioga, the mermaid, claims to be).
We see Mavis making a spell in a magic circle in which she lists the hate she feels in the new home to which her father has brought her since the death of her mother. Gioga drives her wheelchair into the circle and literally 'bumps' into Mavis. Gioga offers Mavis three wishes if Mavis does an errand for her, knowing (from the magic circle that Mavis has drawn) that three wishes will appeal to the young girl. Every one of these points was spotted by the two Y3 classes sitting together to view this film! It's a very rich text and deserves a very close 'reading', which is what it got.
Train of Thought is another drawn animation, but this one has no narrative. It creates a series of images that emerge from one another, rather as our own thoughts tend to do. It is matched by a very strong musical score that provides half the effect, pushing along images as the speed of thought changes. It is not an easy film to describe, but the combination of image and music is very strong and compelling to both teacher and child.
Teaching literacy
The introduction to the teaching guide for these shorts suggests that to be 'fully literate', a child must have some understanding of the ways in which film, video and television operate. And the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) has suggested that to be literate means to be able to make meaning from a range of texts, including 'still and moving images'. A problem for teachers, however, is that the NLS is more narrow in its vision, and focuses on reading and writing without mentioning film. Having said that, these short films could well play an important part in literacy teaching - especially if this is the first of a series of such collections - because there are so many excellent literacy outcomes to be achieved through using them.
The lesson outlines in the teaching guide break each lesson down, to fit in all elements of the literacy hour model. This is very useful, because it could serve as a defence for colleagues who needed to justify using film as a text rather than the written word. However, Gayl and I simply used 30 minutes of the hour to watch and discuss what was going on in each text. We watched the films three or four times, reasoning that the children were seeing more and more at each showing and demonstrating lovely inferential skills as they became increasingly familiar with the text. But we weren't so revolutionary as to spend more than a week on the films, so we had to drop Growing so as to be able to view Mavis and the Mermaid several times over a two-day period.
From Monday to Wednesday, we watched, discussed and then worked independently on tasks related to Mavis and the Mermaid. On Thursday, we watched, and discussed, and then hotseated children in role as characters, so that we knew the film really well; and then, on the Friday, we wrote a letter from the point of view of Mavis, thus writing a first person account of what had happened.
There were several times in the week when I was astounded by what was going on. Gayl and I agreed that it was the most exciting week we had had for a long time, probably because we had completely underestimated the sophistication of the children's viewing skills. We knew that our classes liked videos; but we hadn't expected that they would watch with far greater care than their teachers, nor that they would understand the subtleties of the visual images. The films are dense with information, but the children showed a resoluteness in unpicking their meaning that surprised and delighted me.
On the Monday we also used El Caminante, and, after a discussion, used the ten-square storyboard proved in the teaching guide to sequence the film. This turned out to be a task that the children loved. Even children who might struggle to write ideas down on paper felt well-motivated and confident. Children were wanting to take blank storyboards home with them; when it rained, they wanted to be story-boarding in the wet playtime; and they wanted to storyboard and direct each other in plays. It was a very successful activity.
On Tuesday; as well as Mavis, we used Second Helpings , which is obviously a more demanding film than El Caminante, and, surprisingly, the children couldn't say where they had seen the 3D model animation style before. They had to be jogged into remembering the 'Wallace and Gromit' films and, more recently, Chicken Run. They enjoyed the humour of the film; they coped with the accents; and they demonstrated a very good understanding of the director's intentions throughout. It was a pleasure to discuss with them the workings of Yvonne's mind. Work we had done previously on fables helped them to see that stories carry moral meanings, and they took enthusiastically to this film and the changes that go on within Yvonne to make her a stronger, more confident person. We asked them some quite hard questions in their independent work, and they answered with great maturity.
Children really respond
On Wednesday, we watched and listened to Train of Thought. This was much more abstract than anything else in the pack, and Gayl and I decided to break all the rules and let children form their own response. The images produced by the two classes after viewing the film showed that they were responding by using the same art vocabulary as the film's creator. What especially pleased me was that children were prepared to explain to me the meaning of the images they were creating and how they were linked to the other images that preceded them.
One of the interesting developments over the course of the week was that, as Gayl and I became more and more impressed with our children's responses, they took themselves increasingly seriously as film critics. By the time we got to the Mavis and the Mermaid discussion on Thursday, we were all working at full capacity and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. The children wanted to talk about every aspect of the film, and especially wanted to grapple with the issues of what was real and what was not, what was the truth and what imagined, and how it was that 'wishes' could come true if magic was a made-up thing. Helping children to improve their ability to infer meaning from a text is an issue for every tired pre-SATs teacher in the land; and yet here were Y3 children showing how easy it can be. We were amazed.
By the time children began their extended writing on Friday, they were thoroughly conversant with the film text and able to write their first person letter account very comfortably.
It must be clear from this article that I would certainly recommend using these films. Part of the bfi intention is to teach a film vocabulary, and this is probably what we did least successfully. However, we had a week of literacy that the children loved. They finished the week with a lot of confidence in their own insights, and they filled their teachers with confidence too.
I can see us using these films again with the same age group and getting children to work with each other to storyboard their own ideas for a short film which they could act in, direct and video for themselves. The cooperative work, the sharing of ideas, the drama and the directing would ensure that children used the technical vocabulary provided, began to understand the way in which film was constructed, and talked to each other about the process. I look forward to more bfi shorts in the future, and hope that teachers will take advantage of the benefits that they bring.
Joe Brian teaches at Arbourthorne Junior School in Sheffield.
