New Wine in Old Bottles: "Films without Celluloid" and Making the Most of the Spaces You've Got

Abstract

Because of shortages of film stock, in the 1920s students at the world’s first film school, the Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvenyi Institut Kinematografii in the Soviet Union, were taught to make “films without celluloid”: they wrote “shots” down on pieces of paper and then “edited” them into completed films. At the University of Maryland’s Library Media Services Department we have adopted this technique as a solution to a different problem: our spaces—“group viewing rooms” and classrooms geared towards film screenings—were designed with media consumption in mind. Rather than let this hold us back from promoting media literacy on our campus by beginning to offer instruction in multimedia production, we’ve embraced group work and the “film without celluloid” as ways to teach core storyboarding and film editing despite limited computer resources while we await funding to complete a renovation.