Childhood Scene - Director's Statement of Intent

For this piece, two characters will be used: A teacher, and a student. The student is fighting falling asleep while the teacher lectures. The student tries to escape the room by shrinking to a small size, but the teacher steps on the student. The student awakens from this fantasy to hear valuable information being taught.

The purpose of this scene is to communicate two things: The flawed school system heavy on lecturing and keeping children still, and how I feel now knowing how much I missed as a child imagining escape and not paying attention. Both parties are to blame.

I want to communicate boredom, first. I want the audience to feel pity for the students listening to the lecture, and then sadness when they realize the student is missing out on good information and valuable knowledge.

As a kid, I hated sitting in school for seven hours at a time. Recess was a nice respite, but in class I would never be in class. Everything the teachers taught would seem unimportant to me at the time, and wished to be outside. As such, I feel that much of my childhood I missed knowledge that would benefit my life because of my short attention span and the way the schools tried to teach me. I want to make this scene to show my understanding of this. I want to potentially communicate to others (kids and teachers) that valuable knowledge should be listened to, but also taught in more engaging ways.

The audience should feel that there is not hope for the student to learn anything of note if it is continued to be taught through drawling lectures. To accomplish this, I will make the teacher’s lecture gibberish for the start. When the student awakens from the fantasy of escape, the teacher will be speaking in English—until the student becomes bored again and falls asleep.

Since I am going to shrink the student and make the teacher “large”, I will be playing a lot with space. Deep space will help with the shrunken scenes. I then want to utilize as much affinity in the color scheme as possible in the classroom. Assisting the drawl of the lecture with the drawl of the color.

One big obstacle will be the technical side of green screening a shrunken student. But narratively, I worry over the teacher’s gibberish seeming clichéd and goofy. I am concerned for the message of the film to be too heavy handed. To overcome these, I’m going to make it with two endings. I’ll record the teacher speaking normally, and then gibberish as wild sound. And I’ll have two different lessons the student could hear at the end. Of course, this requires more work, but it is my insurance policy.