Director’s Commentary:

             When I first started thinking about all of this I was overwhelmed.  I had no idea where I was going to go, or even what idea to start with.  After reading the assignment over and seeing the where to start ideas, I began thinking about education, because I am passionate about that and unlike my family which I am also passionate about would be less likely to turn my video into an awe video.  I decided to focus my video then around one thing that is frustrating to me as an educator: tracking.

            So, I had an idea, then I just had to come up with what I wanted to do.  I started writing my ideas about tracking or the lack there of in schools and what that means. I do not want to track because I think kids are unable to do things, I think tracking is important because all kids are different and we are disservicing a lot of kids but expecting them to all become one thing.

            I started writing down thoughts I had about this idea, not knowing where I wanted to go with it, or how I wanted to make my statement.  I decided I would make a commentary using words that have to be read.  I wanted to use simple black and white for two reasons.  One it is the medium through which many children learn to read and write.  It is also two concrete opposite “colors”.  I knew I wanted to use a font that was not type writer-ish.  I wanted the “a” and “g” to not look like a typed “a” or “g” but rather how a child might print it. 

            My thoughts all came down to questions, which are in nature compelling.  They are asking the audience to think about why something is the way it is.  This idea of evaluation is one of the higher order thinking skills that we try to teach kids.  This is something that all kids need to be able to do, ask questions.  Evaluating and questioning are things I think all kids need to be taught regardless of their chosen careers.

            I decided too to put children in the beginning telling what they wanted to be when they grow up.  This is something you hear lots of kids talk about.  ( A couple of years ago when I was teaching preschool I had a student tell me he wanted to be a lion when he grew up and I wished I had that on tape to add to this)  I wanted the audience to hear from students that they don’t all want to be the same thing as they get older.  I wanted them to have a connection to the children I was trying to prove don’t all need to grow up to be the same thing. 

            When it came time to put the clips of the kids talking in the video I had tried changing it to black and white.  I decided quickly against it. The color made a difference in the children being real.  In real life kids are colorful.  Plus this was a contrast to the black and white of the words that was going to follow, which was my point. 

            Brevity was more challenging that I had originally anticipated as well.  My original video was 2 min and 30 seconds. I had each word slide play for 7 seconds.  I also had two other kids in the beginning.  I shortened each slide to 4 seconds and cut two kids out of the video.  I also cropped some of the beginnings of the videos of the kids talking out.  This got it down to the required time limit.

            I watched my video without music and it still worked but not as well, so I decided to leave it in even though we were cautioned against it.  I just think that the more senses that are used the more compelling something is.  Silence can sometimes be more compelling, but for this because there was no moving action on the screen, there needed something more.