What’s in the Frame?
Display the Course Presentation in the student chapter What’s in the Frame?
Show the first two slides.
Show the first two slides of What’s in the Frame?
Explain that slide 2 is what we usually see when we watch something on a screen (whether it’s a TV screen, a movie screen, a computer or a phone).
Does it look like a real conversation happening in a real kitchen?
Sentence starter: A real kitchen looks like… This looks like…
Now show slide 3 and ask students what they can now see outside the frame:
Sentence starter: “I can see…”
Cameras and camera operators
Lights
Microphones
The tops of the “walls”
Also, now that we’ve seen outside the frame we know that some things that looked real – like the leaves outside the window – are fake.
Point out that besides what’s hidden by the frame, we also can’t see anything that the camera isn’t pointed at (for example, we can’t see the person who took the picture. We also can’t see that there is an audience sitting behind the person who took the picture.)
Show slide 4 and ask students what they think they might see if the camera pulled back and we saw outside this frame.
Question prompt: “I wonder what we might see if…”
Now show slides 5 through 7 and highlight that each pair of images is from the same moment.
Ask students:
How are the images different?
How do they feel different?
How do the differences between the images affect how they make us feel?
Next, go to slide 8 and watch the Hippo 2.0 video again, then go to slide 9.
Ask students: how was it different to watch the video now that you know how it was made? Was it still hard to believe the hippos weren’t real?
Show slide 10 and ask students: How would the video be different if you only saw the first part?
Example think-aloud: “What would I think about house hippos if I only saw the first part? I might think they were real because they look real in the video. But I’ve never seen a house hippo. Could hippos be that small? How would they have come to Canada? So I think I would want to find out more before I believed they were real.”
Ask students if they have ever done a similar exercise, in class or elsewhere. If so, ask them to reflect on what has changed since the last time they did.
