In the last edition of Short Films / Big Ideas we looked at Spike Jonze's award winning video for Arcade Fire's The Suburbs and how students can interpret how Jonze's visuals go with Arcade Fire's words. If you didn't get our last edition, or haven't had a chance to read it, you can see it at our blog here.
This week we're thinking about creative writing tasks. One of our favourite creative writing tasks here at Ticking Mind is to get students to imagine the daily life of an ordinary object and to write a narrative or journal entry about it. We can use short films to provide examples and inspiration for this activity. One example of this is The Life and Death of a Pumpkin. A mock horror short film (5 mins) that looks at the terror of a pumpkin who leads an 'idyllic life' before his insides are carved out for halloween. The clip can be viewed on Youtube here.
A more serious and longer example is Plastic Bag which tells the story of a plastic shopping bag that led a contented life with its owner before it was discarded. It can be viewed here. The link between these two films is how we consume, exploit and throwaway the ordinary things around us. And this is the type of thing we want our students to think about when we get them to think about life according to ordinary objects - what are humans really like from the perspective of non-human things.
As a footnote, for those of you who do units on Science Fiction or Future Worlds at any year level, you might like to check out this website: http://www.futurestates.tv/. The short film Plastic Bag is actually part of a series called Future States commissioned by US television station ITVS. ITVS has asked leading film makers to make short films about life in the future of America. Although its American, many of the aspects explored in these short films are universal. All the short films can be viewed at the website.
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