Can You Believe Your Eyes?

If you have already delivered the lesson What’s in the Frame?, remind students of the house hippo video. If not, show them the video in the student chapter House Hippo 2.0 or have students access it. Explain (or remind students) that the video was made with a mix of practical effects (the hippo puppet) and optical effects (some shots were done with a green  screen.)

Ask students: If special effects can make totally convincing scenes of things that don’t exist, or might be used in ways you don’t even notice (as in the Casablanca example), how can we know if anything we see is true?

Explain that because we can’t be sure if what we’re seeing is true, we have to ask different questions than “does it look real”:

Why someone is sharing it (for example, the house hippo video wasn’t trying to make  you believe that house hippos are real; it was trying to show you that videos can be faked). Are they trying to teach you? To fool you? To make you laugh?

Where the thing you’re seeing came from. Do you have reasons to trust them?

Ask students: What about a book, a video, or a person tells you that you can trust them to tell you the truth?

(It’s not necessary to reach a consensus on this question; at this stage making students aware of the issue and modeling the idea of asking questions about information sources is more important.)