Re story-telling with audio — a la radio documentary, This American Life, StoryCorps, Radio Lab:
Reality Radio is a terrific book.
With essays by Jad Abumrad, Jay Allison, damali ayo, John Biewen, Emily Botein, Chris Brookes, Scott Carrier, Katie Davis, Sherre DeLys, Lena Eckert-Erdheim, Ira Glass, Alan Hall, Natalie Kestecher, The Kitchen Sisters, Maria Martin, Karen Michel, Rick Moody, Joe Richman, Dmae Roberts, Stephen Smith, and Sandy Tolan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42XS8stDBX0
Yes, you will watch me open a package I got in the mail today, in true youtubian spirit. I also added some comments on the importance of clipping at the correct time and equipment that I used.
I found that the continuity of shots when clipping together different camera angles of a single action sequence is largely dependent on fulfilling the viewers mental model of time across all clips. I attached a poorly clipped version as well as a visualization to illustrate what I am talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=158n1p69pOU
Pay attention to when the hand leaves and enters the scene and compare it to the previous version.
Equipment: Although it looks like I had a helmet cam or something, its actually just my normal camera attached to my body via the Gorilla Pod.
http://www.amazon.com/Joby-Gorillapod-SLR-Zoom-Tripod/dp/tech-data/B002J91QIK
Here is a link that explains a pretty good travelling set up if you want to shoot video with your camera.
http://www.componentgeek.com/reviews-tips/gorilla-noga/gorillapod-noga-arm-gh1/
Here are the links to the Alvin Ailey dance “Revelations” and to the PDF I showed last week Connect Ed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9uEq9Sjefg&feature=related
gse.berkeley.edu/admin/publications/connected/connected.pdf
Here’s a link to the Ed Kashi photographs we looked at in class on Wednesday: Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta
Also, for any outdoor enthusiasts out there, check out Jimmy Chin’s photography. He’s a professional skier for the North Face and a really talented photographer. When looking at some of these cliff-side shots, I couldn’t help thinking of the discussion we had in class about photographers recreating photo-worthy moments!
Forgive me for producing an example that’s the lowest of the low-brow, but today’s discussion about reality and constructed scenes made me think of the ending of the MTV show The Hills. For those of you lucky enough to have missed this particular phenomenon, the show was a spinoff of a previous MTV reality show (Laguna Beach) and followed one of that show’s “characters” and her friends as they moved to Hollywood. Like a lot of reality TV, it was criticized for being set-up and possibly scripted — criticisms that only grew as the show’s stars became tabloid fixtures without that part of their lives ever being shown on screen.
Anyway, the show attempted to maintain some level of mystery about just how much it was setting up the story, until the final episode, which ended with the following scene — in which two characters say a mournful goodbye, only to have it revealed that (SPOILER ALERT!) they’ve been filming on a soundstage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8gyXYr1ZAM
Here’s the link to the photo (and accompanying article) I showed.
Can’t wait to share our conversation with my friends who have been debating why that picture was used!
Objectified documentary from todays class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU
I’m Michael, second year master’s student at the I School. I’m focusing on the design and implementation of data visualizations for large data sets. That also means that I can finally put my background in computer science and my dark past working on large-scale databases for Swiss banks into good use.
I used to be passionate about analog b/w photography and spent quite some free time in dark rooms developing my pictures. i don’t maintain my Flickr account, but some random selection of my pictures can still be seen there. What sparked my interest in photography was an Henri Cartier Bresson exhibition in Tel Aviv back in the day. His life work is currently also shown at SF MOMA, and it’s definitely worth a visit.
My final project team designs an educational platform for distance learners, which presents students with multi-modal narratives. I hope that what we do in the course of this semester informs the design of our system. Apart from that, I’m looking forward to explore media editing tools a little further.
Contact me at mike@ischool.berkeley.edu
Many people have said they’re interested in this class to improve their production of media.
This class has two thrusts: theoretical/conceptual, and practical. My premise is that the former will help people do better at the latter. There’s more to creating a presentation than knowing how to work a camera.
On the practical side, we will address the following:
Students’ existing skills in these domains vary from none to expert — all are welcome.
This is not a technical class, but we will work with basic hardware and software to learn the essentials.