Team Green: "Imagining" the ECHS film

In thinking about how to best approach a documentary film on a high school I’ve taken the time to look at two documentaries on the educational system that Steven suggested.
One was called The First Year (2001). It’s about five first year teachers instructing in South Los Angeles classrooms at five different schools ranging from grades kindergarten to 11th grade ESL. In the film there were no formal talking head interviews or narration to guide the viewer and frame the narrative. The filmmakers did use title frames to string the teacher’s similar experiences together. For instance, “I’m having a problem with one of my students,” preceded the filmmakers showing each teacher's struggle with a student in their classroom.

The second film was called I Am A Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School (1993), which won an Academy award. This film centered on an “inner-city” elementary school in Philadelphia made up of all African-American students. The filmmakers primarily followed the principal who often complained about the lack of funding the school received and highlighted the faculty’s difficulty with constantly having to discipline the students while attempting to teach them. This film employed the use of narration and was filmed over the course of one school year. At the end the principal leaves her position at the school citing lack of support from the school district as the reason.
Both films gave me tons of ideas about what I like and also what I didn’t want us to do with story development and cinematography. They both grazed the surface and it appeared as though the filmmakers didn’t take ample time to get to know the participants. During interviews some people seemed uncomfortable or the off camera questioning seemed off the cuff and didn’t probe enough to get more thoughtful and in depth responses.
As anthropologists we have a unique advantage of being able to hang out, develop a great rapport with participants, take field notes and watch the potential for stories to unfold right before our eyes. And I think this was the element missing from the documentaries that I watched. We can get in there and make space for people to open up in ways traditional documentary filmmakers may not.
With the semester drawing to a close I contemplate on what kind of film my group will produce. We’re still in the stages of contacting teachers and getting their availability so we can start to make trips to the school. It hasn’t been an easy process. The issue of how to distribute permission slips to any student we happen to get on camera has been a source of frustration for us. Yet, we’re beginning to talk about ways to remedy that and still move forward with our project.
So, back to this issue of how our film will look and feel. Honestly, I’m not sure yet. After this semester I still can’t see the images we intend to capture or the type of stories we plan to tell that will come from the students. With filming during winter break and through February since we have to start editing in March we don’t have a lot of time.
As we begin to look ahead and plan for the upcoming semester we need to remember that we have methods available to us that can assist with getting at the stories we’d like to develop and can help us to produce a potentially meaningful film.