Meeting Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Sort of

What would happen if students could step into the author’s reality before reading any of her verses? What would you do if you found yourself in Jane Austin’s parlor about to have tea with her besties or if you discovered yourself the center of Robert Browning’s attention as he recounts the story of how he met and wooed his wife? Would you be more interested in reading her work or his? Would students?

This is the thought that I had when thinking about how to harness cinematic virtual reality, that new stereoscopic immersive magic for use with high school literature students. I’ll admit, I wanted (and still want) to play with the technology - to create worlds in hopes that these greats of literature will be viewed not as people from some distant reality with nothing to say to current students who live and die by their digital devices, scanning the images and text flying under their fingers for consumable news to be reposted or retweeted or rejected but as people whose lives, while clothed in different eras, held the same hopes and dreams, the same desires and needs as we still have today.

There is a reason our schools require great literature to be taught - it is universal, archetypal, it feeds the soul. But if it is not read, if summaries and video clips are consumed in lieu of the literature, the soul unknowingly loses.

How, then, to entice digital natives away from their devices and back to their books?

For me, it is this idea that my team made a reality - educational cinematic virtual reality.

Once I had the location secured, the Armstrong Browning Library, and my cinematographer (now friend and cohort in creation, Marcos), I let myself create the curriculum I would want to use for my students - all of them I have had the privilege and pleasure (and sometimes pain) or learning with over the decades. I thought how boring to just look through the lens of a camera, to walk into a space and look around and step out. How much more exciting to fill the space with purpose, with people? And so I did.

I read on Elizabeth Barrett Browning (affectionately referred to as EBB by me and the crew, and as “Ba” by her family and friends), I studied her as I would if I were preparing a lesson for my students. I learned and as I learned I sifted the information, weaving the stories I would have told in lecture instead into lines of dialogue for actors to speak.

And after hours and hours and hours of visions and revisions that a moment could reverse, my director and co-author, Gabe Lipton, had helped me craft a script that provided all the pieces for a student to discover who this Elizabeth was.

This first offering is bulky - how could it not be when we are in unchartered territory, working in a medium that is as new new for us as was film for the Lumiere brothers?

Our next one will be sleeker, more fitting the medium, more useful of the z-axis, more elegant with the audio — Our next one will apply the lessons of this first offering as well as the lessons I learn from the teachers who will be the foundation of my dissertation study —

Our next one will be our first as a company and I, for one, can’t wait to experience what we create. I hope you can’t either - more, I hope you’ll join us on this adventure by following what we do, by supporting us if you can, by spreading the word if you will. I guarantee it’s going to be an amazing ride. - amg