Media Soup

This video created by Zach Hanover, Alex Holt, Samantha Honig and Julie Hyman, generated a good deal of class discussion in SMPA-112 Intro to Digital Media this Spring.

I was mixed on all of the “stylistic” things that the students tried here, but they were well thought out, and maintained the emotional impact . . . still, it was interesting to get the diversity of views on what they did. In the end, for me, I think you should only put so many spices in the stew, or it may be over seasoned.

More to the point, see what you think:

Everything Went Black from Alex Holt on Vimeo.

I was quite impressed with this video that Joe Sangiorgio and Mike Stone produced in SMPA-112 Introduction to Digital Media. It’s worth noting that the team had a respectable cut to screen on 2 days after the event – great job guys!

SMPA-122: Introduction to Digital Media returns this Fall with a revised syllabus:

http://home.gwu.edu/~josder/112/pdf/SMPA112_Syllabus.pdf

My students are constantly surprising and impressing me.

One unexpected thing that came out of this semester was some great examples of branding – catchy titles that are appealing, memorable, and aprapo:

“The Great White Mark” – DC’s premeire white rapper and radio personality

“Sons of Pitch” – an a capella group

“ESMNBC” – a spoof news network (creator’s initials are ESM)

More student work, this time by Evan Madow:

http://smpa.evanm.com/emsnbc.htm

A student project by Thomas Wall and Michael Riccio.

I’ve gotten that question pretty often this semester.

It is not typical to teach digital vidography, Final Cut Pro, and HTML in one class, and thus this is a relevant question to ask.

After one semester, and with some caveats, I think we can say it is a good idea.

I asked the class this, and they affirmed.

For me, a great moment is Shawn’s talk was when he pulled up the Digg swarm representation.

First of all, this is very cool, and just the kind of thing I like. I mean, it’s abstract art derived from user ratings of websites.

But moreover, it is a visual representation of the very same chaos that Frank Sesno spoke about the other night at the major’s meeting (and Shawn pointed this out: “you’re screwed”).

We had Shawn Rider in class yesterday, and I thought that it went very very well.

The title of Shawn’s talk was:

“Open, Mashed, Remixed, Rated: Toward a User-Generated, Content-Heavy, Standards-Based, Dynamic, Socially Networked, Semantic World Wide Web of Wonder ”

I thought he had a great structure for talking about the progression of the web, and things that tied into Frank’s talk on the previous night in some surprising and interesting ways. (Although only myself and about 4 of my students were at the talk.)

Here are few things that Shawn showed that were new to me:

http://labs.digg.com/swarm/

http://www.ning.com/

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/