Today’s Plan:
- Draft Update
- Multimodal Presentations
- Quick Primer on Visual Rhetoric
- Saving and Cropping in Photoshop
- Audio Editing
- UNCO Resources
Multimodal Presentations
As I mentioned on Monday, you have two primary obligations for the rest of the semester:
- The first is to revise your final papers. These papers will be due the Monday of exam week.
- The second is to transform your final paper into a “video.” I scare quote video because I’m not looking for a film, but rather a multimodal presentation.
By multimodal presentation, I am thinking of something along the lines of a PechaKucha. Let’s look at a model for this assignment. As you watch, try to identify important elements of its genre.
Alright, what did we see?
Let’s try another relay, Scientific American’s 60 Second Science series. First note: most of these aren’t actually 60 seconds. They tend to be 2-3 minutes. Yours will be 5 minutes.
Some Basic Techniques/Parameters
When I teach my Professional Writing and Digital Video course, one of the first principles I introduce is from Steve Stockman’s How to Shoot Video that Doesn’t Suck. Stockman insists that videographers limit their shot lengths to 10 seconds. I’d stress that 10 seconds is a good start, but even that length will feel long to most television and movie watchers. The next time you are watching a show, try to spend about a minute counting how long a shot remains on screen before it changes–you’ll see that the typical shot length isn’t more than 3-5 seconds!
So, there’s no way I want to emulate PechaKucha’s 20 second rule. To keep the math easy, let’s go with Stockman’s principle–10 seconds per shot. Since I want your videos to be 5 minutes, six shots a minute, for a total of 30 images. Next week I’ll show you some basic image editing techniques in Photoshop–cropping, altering brightness and saturation, grayscaling particular parts of an image, etc.
Today I want to talk about a few fundamental principles for taking photos/videos:
- Rule of Thirds
- Headspace
- Lighting
- Opening/Establishing Shot
I also want to encourage you to be adventurous and inventive with these videos. The criteria are up for negotiation if you want to try something more ambitious. Let’s watch two more potential relays:
Homework
Take 5 photos that you could use for your project.
