Tag: Movies

whiteboard cinema & royal alpacas

Yesterday in my neighborhood some little girls were selling their drawings, lemonade-stand style, for 25 cents apiece. I bought this one, which I imagined was a family of royal alpacas. It turns out they are unicorns.

Unicorns

Also this week, we’ve wrapped up my Film Studies class for the year. All year, I’ve been tracing onto the white board paused scenes from the movies we’ve been watching, as backdrops for our discussions. I started an Instagram account for these last semester (@whiteboardcinema), and I’ve posted a few of the drawings on this blog. Here are some more from the last few months. One of my students, Sydnee H., did this one from Raising Arizona:

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Here’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (with a freehand Spiderman by Zaida W.)…

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…  and a few stills from The Godfather (Parts I and II) …

luca brasi

sonny godfather

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… Strangers on a Train …

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… and, most recently, Moonrise Kingdom:

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I’m compelled by art that’s designed to be temporary, made to evaporate, wither, or vanish: jack-o-lanterns, sand castles and mandalas, whiteboard or Etch-a-Sketch drawings, fresh magic markings sold to strangers like lemonade. I think it’s good practice, to create something special from scratch and then to let it go.

I don’t have anything especially deep to say about any of that, I just think it’s a good thing to do.

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:

Psycho 2

ET

Kane 1

Kane 2

Modern Times

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.)