Right now, everyone around the world is experiencing the universal truth that limitations breed creativity. Recently our 8th grade auteurs proved this truth when they filmed their own commercials. This particular drama unit comes with strict constraints: make a 30-second commercial using anything from your home, but with only one camera and in one shot.

The challenge is to take what’s in your head, navigate obstacles, and use the tools at your disposal to get your message to your audience. By 8th grade, Hyla students have experienced film as an audience, and they have all been actors on stage presenting to an audience. Now they take a turn behind the camera.

In this unit, students explore storytelling and new layers of creative choice, control, and expression through camera technique. To help students understand what it means to speak through the camera’s eye, Chris invited Greg Grunberg to talk with students about his experience as an actor, director and producer, including work on several Star Wars films. “My goal,” said Chris, “was to get students to problem solve around their ideas and see what they could accomplish out of their original concept.” As Chris will tell you, it’s the limitations that bring out innovation: “The best part was the various ‘fixes’ to the creative problems that they faced.”

One student invested extensive free time to master a specific camera technique, one student engineered a lego camera dolly and then motorized it (see above). From commercial to commercial, ingenuity is in evidence, from props, to camera path, to use of lighting, to crew, to cameo sibling appearances. “It was fun to see sibling alums on camera and know there was a parent behind the scenes working crew,” Chris added. 

Throughout this process of challenging students to create despite limitations, Chris was moved to discover that despite distance, connections with students continue to deepen. Chris explained that through Zoom, “we are getting a much more personal window into our kids’ lives.” Speaking from experience as someone who has spent time in front of the camera, he added, “As you may have noticed by now, the camera does not lie. And when it sits so close to your face, you cannot escape the power of what your eyes and expressions tell us and how much more comes across when everyone is now sitting in the “front row”.” Students took this fresh new experience of being in front of the camera to their work behind it, and what they accomplished was impressive.