a shaggy dog's tale

Make a film for your Media Studies presentation, they said...




EDIT: In response to a request from someone in class, here's the 'justification' for the above insanity. For anyone who's not on the PGCE course, every other project in the class was about personal reflection, taking photographs of yourself growing up and doing a voice-over over a montage of them etc... weepy weepy reflections. Obviously, this piece of work is different...


A Shaggy Dog’s Tale:
The Challenges & Possibilities of Mixed Media and User-Generated Content for Educators (and Everyone Else)

In his somewhat verbose tome How To Read A Film, the film theorist James Monaco foresees the ethos behind much of the user-generated content that draws attention across the burgeoning goldfields of Web 2.0:

“What is to be done?” We cannot stop the juggernaut that is the contemporary media. It will continue to saturate our lives. New modes of discourse, because they insist the at the reader become an active participant in the process, may give us opportunities to find our roots again. But ethics is the new aesthetics of the future. We must focus on the uses to which our talents and technologies are put. It is no longer sufficient to know how to read a film. Now we must also understand in a profound way, how to use a film.
(Monaco 2000, p.561)

Monaco’s point is one to be seriously considered, no more so at the level of amateur film and video production, whether for personal, public, promotional or educational purposes. From the Golden Age of Hollywood, through the New Wave and the age of the blockbuster, it can be argued that the medium became one of passive engagement; as creativity faded into generic produce, audience demographics shifted and the cinema’s forward motion became static.

However, the advent (and now the second coming) of the internet and user-generated content, combined with the accessibility and affordability of the basic requirements for film making, have meant that film has become an active viewing experience like never before. And with the access and simplicity comes the prevolence of the next step: the rise of mixed media production.

A Shaggy Dog’s Tale was produced utilising other media beyond the filmed segments and video editing software. Also present were a basic audio recording setup, content streamed and processed from internet video websites (i.e. content created by other users), a scanner and photo manipulation software, and a variety of online freeware and search facilities.

The list of hardware and software already exaggerates somewhat the typical techniques employed: none of the skills required were any more difficult than it seems many school children are already familiar with – particularly as they continue to seemingly outpace adult observers. One has only to log onto the social networking websites like Bebo or MySpace to observe how adept teenagers are at documenting even the most irrelevant moments in startlingly profession ways. Furthermore, kids do not just produce these pieces – they forward, e-mail, comment, and respond in kind in a show of interaction to make James Monaco very excited indeed. (No clearer example of this is needed than on the video sharing network YouTube, where users can frequently record and upload their immediate responses to all and every video posted – creating a wealth of interactivity.)

But what does all this jargon and newspeak actually boil down to for educationalists? That, with no budget but a little imagination, any individual can be inspired by, interacting with, and producing film in the comfort of their own home, with equipment which it could be argued is, for the most part, available in the majority of schools, and arguably most homes in Western society. Mixing the media of film, photography, audio recording, internet content and text is, like media studies itself, still regarded with great suspicion by the academic establishment at large. However, if educationalists fail to keep up, the may soon find themselves left out in the cold by a generation who are already looking for the next level of hands-on creativity.

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References


Books:

Monaco, J., 2000. How To Read A Film. 3rd edition. New York: Oxford University Press.


Film:

Huey, P., 2008. A Shaggy Dog’s Tale: The Reflections Of Puddles T. Dawg. Northern Ireland: mediatree productions.


Websites:

Bebo - http://www.bebo.com
MySpace – http://www.myspace.com
YouTube – http://www.youtube.com