The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

Page 392 The Educational Screen SCHOOL MADE MOTION PICTURES HARDY R. FINCH. Editor Head of the English Department Greenwich High School, Greenwich, Conn. Biology High School Class Produces Teaching Film A SCIENCE class offers many opportunities for the making of an interesting filni. The stud- ents of Girls' High School. Brooklyn. New York, under the direction of Mrs. Kegina Reiner-Deutsch. found a very interesting film subject in their biology class and developed it. Mrs. Reiner-Deutsch's ac- count, forwarded to your editor by .A.gnes H. Bennett, chairman of biology at Girls' High School, follows: AN honor class in biology should do some original work, but as we were in a very small annex with- out a laboratory room or laboratory assistant, and without much material, we were greatly limited in our opportunities. We, therefore, enthusiastically accepted the proffered loan of a 16mm moving picture camera from an art teacher in our building and decided to work on something not represented in our depart- ment's film library. The class, after some discussion, selected "Response" from a group of such topics. "We were already much interested in our aquarium of tropical fish on which most of the class had done outside readings; so we decided to use it in our pic- ture. It was to serve as motivation for our studv of reaction in living things; therefore the first scene taken showed the class grouped around the tank, ob- serving fish behavior, then making notes and formula- tion questions based on their observations. Such a question was embodied in a title serving to introduce the more elementary part of the work. This title and the others also, were, however, photographed later. "We went on to picture some of the simplest reac- tions of plants and animals. The best sort of teaching film, which we hoped this would be, should, of course, stimulate thought in an audience and show material not available in the ordinary classroom, but this lat- ter was simply impossible becau.se of our limitations. We u.sed snails and mimosa or "sensitive plant" re- sponding to touch. We took shots of a growing po- tato plant beginning to sprout and, finally, climbing past all obstacles to the light. Similar views of sprout- ing seedings in "packet gardens" were taken to illus- trate reactions to moisture and to gravity. We photo- graphed students holding long "glass chimney" tubes full of fruit flies to show reactions to gravity and to light. "From these studies of tropisms we advanced to work on reflexes. We introduced this by a shot of a student showing the class a chart containing the clas- sic reflex arc diagram and the sections of the spinal cord and its connections. We tried here to intro- duce a little fun into our film by showing students shivering and stamping. Then when they inadvertently leaned against a radiator, the consequent effect was ■evident. IVitli a question box on the making of school film productions, conducted bj- DONALD A. ELDRIDGE, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. "Trying out the 'pupil reflex' involved a group looking at a victim's e}e before and after shining a flash- light into it. \N'hen we later .saw how inconclusive was this effect, we spliced in a makeshift 'moving dia- gram' made by successive views of student-made charts of the eye, each one with a slightly smaller pupil. We also used a group trying out the knee-jerk reflex on each other. One student surprised a girl absorbed in her notes by creeping up on her and sticking a pin into her arm. After the victim's violent jerk, the ex- perimenter suddenly jwked a pencil toward her eye. The sudden closing of her eyelid was eloquent testi- mony that she really hadn't expected any of this. "Last we went back to the fish tank, where we de- cided that the swimming of fish to the top at our ap- proach to the tank was a conditioned reflex, in which sight or sound was the substitute stimulus, the original one having been the presence of food. The group re- turned to seats and wrote busily. The last shot was over a student's shoulder as she wrote 'The End'." As this was the first such project in our school, we were beset by the fear of high costs, so were most mis- erly in the use of film, the most expensive single item in our budget. We therefore used only three rolls of film and discarded just the most hopeless parts. As we had no titler, we experimented with available mate- rials. Chalk on the blackboard was first tried. When our first roll came back, the two titles we had tried were unreadable, in spite of the greatest illumination we could muster, three photofloods in reflectors. We reluctantly gave up this method and fell back on the use of black crayon and 9" x 12" stiff white paper. "These titles required slow pressure on the crajon so we gave up the idea of photographing them during their making and used them finished with the student's hand, in some cases, apparently making the last stroke. We laid them between lines ruled on the floor and swung our camera on its tripod to face down. Then a student lay down under it to hold the paper in place, and after shooting a few titles, we all needed a good rest. Our heavy camera had a tendency to inch from its proper position which, oddly enough, once did bring into better view a overly long title. How we laughed when we saw this fortuitous improvement in the fin- ished film! "It is needless to describe the first roll after pro- cessing. It sent us on to the next with extra zestj much needed, as we had to repeat some unsuccessful parts. When told we could buy a third roll, it seemed as if we couldn't limit ourselves that much, so many ideas popped up for additional titles. Indeed, when we had used up every bit of the last roll, it wasn't as clear as desirable, but as the picture seemed worth (Concluded on page 394)