CI 5472: Film in the Classroom

I think it would be interesting to have students read a short story—such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Three-Ten to Yuma” by Elmore Leonard, or even something like “Jumanji” (a short story made into a children’s picture book) by Chris Van Allsburg. After having read the story, show the film adaptation to the class. Because the films started out as short stories and where then turned into feature length films, I think it would be interesting to have the students examine what elements of the story are the same and what are different. Since the short story format doesn’t leave much room for a tremendous amount of detail, the film adaptors needed to find details either within the story (as inferred by the text) or through their own interpretation of the story (their personal response and visualization of the text).The teacher could provide students with a hand out that asks them to identify where details were added into the story—where was the story embellished and lengthened—and have them consider where the screenwriters added this detail, how they inferred that these details could/should exist within the story, etc.

Next, students could role-play the conversation that might have occurred between the original author of the text and the screenwriter. What questions would the author have for the screenwriter? Would the author be critical of the finished product or merely curious as to where/how the screenwriter created the details to add to the film adaptation? This could be written out, acted, or even filmed. Groups could present these interviews to one another and the teacher could use this to create a strong discussion as to what/how much creative freedom should be given to screenwriters in developing a film.

For a final assignment, the teacher could provide students with several different options of short stories to read and adapt into some sort of story board using ComicLife, VoiceThread, or iMovie—making sure that at least two students were creating an adaptation from the same short story. These adaptations would need to contain a set amount of added detail to the story in order to serve as storyboards for a larger film production. Students would need to provide explanations to support any additions to the story they put into their adaptation—providing insight into why they visualized something a specific way much the same way they analyzed the film version (personal vision due to the creator’s experiences or inferences made from their reading of the story, just to name a couple of ways to go about doing this). These would be shared with the class in a small “Film Festival” of their storyboards and students would be asked to reflect on the different interpretations of the same stories.

I think this activity would help students to think about author’s purpose and to consider how people read texts from different perspectives and therefore have differing opinions about a text. The teacher could go even farther and have students take on specific roles from which to create a film adaptation of the short story—for example, a conservative man from the South might interpret “Three-Ten to Yuma” differently than a escaped convict from the East. Anyway, I think this would be a fun way to get students thinking about how they read a text, what an author/creator’s purpose might be, and how to make inferences or pick out clues from a text to enhance one’s reading.