whiteboard cinema

I teach a film class to high school kids, and since it’s only a fifty-minute class, we usually have to pause mid-way through each movie and finish it up the next day.

We started the year with Psycho, and after class the movie was paused on a close-up of Janet Leigh’s face. I pulled up the screen and traced her picture with an Expo marker on the whiteboard underneath.

Since then I’ve been tracing scenes from all the movies we’ve watched. Sometimes the drawings compete for space on the whiteboard with notes from this or another class.

Here are a few of the films we’ve watched so far this year:

If you’d like to see where we go from here, you can follow my brand new(!!) Instagram account, @whiteboardcinema, where I’ll post more drawings as they come up in class. I’ll also be asking my students to send me their own drawings of their own movie favorites, and I’ll post those drawings there too along the way.

(It’s my firm belief, by the way, that everyone should draw pictures, like most of us did at some point when we were kids. You don’t need to be good at it; being “good” is entirely beside the point. And speaking of movies, did you know Roger Ebert liked to draw? I invite us all to embrace his example.)