Syllabus: GEN 230 Creative Expression: Theater: Fall 2009

The links on this syllabus will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.

Schedule at a Glance

On Friday, January 22, for that day only, the 8 AM section (NOT the 9:10 AM section) will meet in H107 instead of the Lecture Hall.

	class days	topic / activity	deliverable	due date	format
	January 20, 22	introduction to the course introduction to your video project
Pre-Production	January 25, 27, 29	overview of the process cast OC scene review of your ideas rehearse and run OC scene analysis of video structure model videos	list of ideas	January 25	email response to my email to your school address	Pre-Production
	February 1, 3, 5	pitch your concept to your classmates (taped for pitch vid to be edited and uploaded to YT) rehearse and run OC scene	concept for your video (<25 words)	Feb 1	oral presentation and written email (not an attachment, just type or paste it directly into the email)
	February 8, 10, 12	explain your treatment to your classmates rehearse and run OC scene	treatment for your concept	Feb 8	oral and email
	February 17, 19	production values demo - light and sound, taping OC scene final cut demo, motion demo, soundtrack demo	final script	Feb 19	email
		Gateway 1 appointment with me to look at your script and production lists, discuss casting, and foresee production challenges		Feb 17 - 24	personal appointment
Production	February 22, 24, 26	read scripts with tentative casts	production lists shot list	Feb 22 Feb 26	email	Production
	March 1 - 19	filming in studio and on location (including Spring Break)	scene rehearsed, performed shot list directed, taped with attention to production values	March 1 - 19	personal attendance
	March 22, 24, 26	video editing resources and techniques using your raw videotaped footage	collected media assets project file for pitch clip	March 22 March 2	laptop, USB, or external or network drive .fcp or .mswmm file
		Gateway 2 appointment with me to view the media assets for your project and the .fcp or .mswmm project file for your pitch video		March 22 - 26	personal appointment
Post-Production	March 29, 31, 7	view and critique pitch videos: titles, credits, production values, cuts, effects, soundtrack discussion, examples, demos	video editing: pitch clip on YouTube	March 29	uploaded .mov or .wmv file	Post-Production
	April 9, 12	opening titles, closing credits for your final video	titles, credits	April 5	.mov or .wmv file
	April 14, 16, 19	view first cuts	first cut, project file soundtrack	April 14 April 19	.fcp or .mswmm file .stmp or .aup or .mp3 file
	April 21, 23, 26, 28	demos of Motion, Soundtrack, and Audacity using your media assets review of YouTube description and tags reflections on the process: what did you learn and how?	youtube description, tags	April 26	email
	April 30, May 3 and Final exam	Showtime!	final cut uploaded to You Tube self-assessment	May 3 May 3 May 7	.mov or .wmv or other video file .flv file (made by YT from your upload) email

Topics and Activities

Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
-- Winston Churchill

Introduction to the Course

Last December, the last time I taught GEN 230 Creative Expression, we spent the final few class days in the Lecture Hall watching the students' final projects on the big screen.

The students had a good hoot watching them, but for me it was like a final exam. The problems I saw, as a teacher, were not all solvable. But some were, and this course for Spring 2010 is my attempt to raise the overall quality of the final videos by improving the process. It's not a complicated process, but it structures a complicated activity, which is making a short video in just a few months when you have a lot of other things demanding your attention. If you are engaged in the process and you meet all the deadlines, you will accomplish more by the end of the semester than you think you can now.

This course, in a sentence: By early May, you will have, on YouTube, a video that you made. Guiding you through the process step-by-step, I will do my best to help you make it a video that you are proud of.

There is no ink-on-paper textbook for this course. All the course materials and almost all of your work will be available online. You may, however, need to spend some money on theater tickets and a couple of mini-DV tapes.

People are watching hundreds of millions of videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

20 hours per minute!! The two sections of this course, with 50 students each uploading a 5-minute video, will be contributing a little over four hours of video, about 12 seconds in YouTube-time.

overview of the course web

Every page whose URL begins with http://toLearn.net/gen230/... .htm is part of this course web. This course web has four pages:

welcome, the lecture I would have given on the first day of class BW (before the Web)

course, the official page of course info that every student must receive at the beginning of every course

reports, the page with a class roster, oral presentation schedules, and a chart where we can make sure we agree on your deliverables

and this page, the syllabus, which has the schedule at a glance listing the day-by-day topics and the due dates for your deliverables (aka homework).

We also have a page (or "channel") at YouTube for the course: Matteo Ricci's Channel. Some of the videos from the last two sections of this course, Fall 2008 and Fall 2009, are available on that channel. Yours will be there soon.

Ideas for your video

In less than two weeks, you need to come up with the concept for your video for this course. Here are some ideas to get you started.

make a satirical or straight episode of a TV show: Cheaters, So You Think You Can Dance?, American Idol.

make a video response to someone else's video, for example a video on YouTube or one done for NFFTY - National Film Festival for Talented Youth (that's you!)

send a message -- advocate a cause or point of view, your own or that of a not-for-profit organization that could use the publicity. For example, "The Faces of Hunger in Buffalo" or "Wind Turbines Rock"

recreate a scene from a movie, either straight or satirically. For example, reverse the genders of the characters but keep the plot line and dialogue -- the results can be pretty funny. (Think of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts delivering each other's lines in Pretty Woman.)

document a newsworthy event, either a real event or one you stage. For example, some nut wanders in from off-campus (or a teacher or other student cracks) and holds your roommate hostage in the downstairs classroom in 85 Humboldt. What happens next?

make a video version of a research essay you (or someone else) wrote for a course in the past, or one this semester, or your senior thesis for GEN 411.

illustrate a poem, that is, make the video to show while the poem is read as a voice-over or appears as text on the screen. Music, too, of course.

make an info-mercial for a ridiculous product or a commercial for a real product.

enter a contest at StudentFilmmakers.com -- or if the deadline has passed, do a video that could have been entered in the contest or is inspired by one of the contests

enter RockMoto's contest - "RockMoto challenges up-and-coming filmmakers, film students, web video producers and others to create a short video showing what can be done on a motorcycle or scooter with one tank of gas in one day. The top video wins $1,000." contest rules

enter the Outrageous Interactions contest - "Lights, camera, call center?! That’s right, you read correctly. Interactive Intelligence, a leading call/contact center software provider, is looking for videos of your most hysterical, bizarre, unbelievable, outrageous customer service interactions -- talking to a live person on the phone or interacting with an automated system, real or imagined. Got a doozie for us? Well get off your duff, grab a camera, a friend or seven, and show us what happened."

try a case - set up a courtroom and put someone on trial, either seriously or satirically: the Nigerian for trying to blow up the plane at Christmas, your landlord or an NFL coach for being stupid.

satirize daily life - ex: the worst first date; the perfect way to break up with your boyfriend/girlfriend; stupid teacher tricks; disasters in public speaking class; what really happens in ... the cafeteria kitchen / the women's locker room / the library stacks / the President's office / the room where Vet Tech keeps the rodents.

fantasy sports - tape a Medaille men's basketball game with three or four different cameras. Then re-arrange and mix-and-match the parts to create a different ending for the game, adding play-by-play, commentary, commercials, scoreboard shots, and sounds appropriate to how you rearranged reality.

These are general areas. Just before class, I sent an email to all of you at your official school address. In in, I give more detailed instructions and ask you to respond to it ASAP with half a dozen specific concrete ideas. If fifty students each send me that many ASAP, by Monday, I'll copy and paste them all into one big list and we'll have hundreds to look at on the big screen. Somewhere in there will be something to inspire you.

machinima - anything that appears on your Playstation or Xbox screen can be captured as a video file, which can be edited just like video you took with your camera. You can then add voices, music, and effects. The technique is officially called machinima, aka poor person's animation.

stop-motion - claymation videos use this technique, but you can use dolls, toys, or even real people. Set it up, take a still picture. Move the dolls slightly. Take another picture. Line up hundreds if not thousands of still pictures in a video editor, add voice, music, and effects. Again, poor person's animation.

acting troupes

There are twenty-five students in this class, so we are going to break into five troupes of five, more or less, and rehearse the beginning of the first scene of the female version of The Odd Couple, Neil Simon's Broadway, movie, then TV production from the 1980's. We are doing this to give you some practical acting experience and so that your classmates can better cast you in their videos.

In addition, the scene will take about four minutes to act out, about the length of the video you will make for this course, so you will get some idea of how much script material can fit into four minutes.

assignments

respond to my email with your half-dozen concrete specific ideas for videos for this course.

Most of the course assignments will be explained at length lower down on this page as part of the process, but a couple of them don't fit the process neatly and are explained here.

watch video, stage plays, and other performances as a maker rather than as a consumer.

You will go to four public performances, two stage plays and two readings. One of the stage plays should be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde presented by Kaleidoscope Theatre in our Lecture Hall/classroom before February 13. The other, I hope, will be an evening of one-act plays written and directed by former students in this course and acted by other students, some of whom took this course and others who are in the Medaille Music and Drama Club.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - free performance for students, Monday, February 8th. 7:30 PM with a Talkback Session between the cast, crew, design team and audience will immediately follow the performance.

For the two author appearances, I recommend Ted Pelton on January 28 and two others in the Write Thing Reading Series, either Lily Hoang February 11 or Dan Nester on April 8. If you can't make those Thursday evening dates, many other campus and community arts events would satisfy this requirement. Please contact me with your alternatives.

In order for you to get a preview of the time commitment involved in post-production, you are going to make a very short test video and carry it all the way through the post-production process to distribution on YouTube. To differentiate it from your main video project for this course, I call this short test video your "pitch vid". The pitch vid will have a title sequence, a short clip of you pitching your concept from the Lecture Hall stage, and closing credits. You will add music, which will take you through the audio mixing process. I want to see the .fcp or .mswmm project file for this pitch vid as well as the .flv version that YouTube will make from the .mov or .wmv file that you upload.

Twice during this process, between pre-production and production at the end of February, and then between production and post-production at the end of March, you and I will sit together to discuss your progress. This appointment might take two minutes and we can do it after class one day. Or it might take an hour and we need to sit together at a computer in the Huber Mac lab working out your problems.

These gateways are designed to give you feedback on your progress through the process. Given the short time constraint of the semester, these gateways will also keep you on track to complete the process with sufficient opportunity for experimentation, feedback, and reflection.

If you do not pass a gateway, that is, if you do not have a script to show me in late February and media assets in late March, I will send an official Academic Warning report to your advisor because I will be having serious doubts about whether you will be able to successfully complete the course at an A or B level. Depending on how far behind you are, I may recommend that you drop the course.

Introduction to Your Video Project

In this course, you will go through the process of making a video with opening and closing credits and a music mix as well as a point/purpose, transitions and effects. The process is more important than the product. Or, more accurately, an orderly, thoughtful process is more likely to produce an attractive, engaging product. Conversely, unsuccessful products are often the results of a hasty, unplanned process.

Making the transition

One goal of this course is to help you through the transition from passively consuming media to also actively making it. Between them is a transition -- a mindset, a way of looking at media, a critical stance -- that may be new and uncomfortable to you.

This is a creative expression course, an art course, one of the very few you take in your formal education. As such, it can be a little scary. Instead of analyzing plays and films, you're going to write them. Your learning will diverge, not converge.

It's the transition from reading to writing, from consumer to maker. It requires you to learn a new toolset.

For most people, the first transition is relatively easy. The second is harder. Not only am I asking you to make something, it has two problems: it's the arts, and it's school.

The audience for your work in this course is those people who have stumbled on it linked to your resume near "Skills" or via a search at Google.com or YouTube.com. They may be in a position to hire you or admire you, and your online projects will let you strut your stuff for them. Go for it! I expect you to see how this creative stuff can relate to a job you may have. It is also designed to move you further into the new and fascinating world of user-generated content.

If you look at the list of deliverables, you'll see that I'm asking you to go through the process of making a video. The product, the video, is much less important than the process. I am going to continually throughout the semester stress the process, not the product.

However, you still have to make a product. What will you make? If you want to, you may make a version of the first scene of The Odd Couple, the Broadway play, comedy film, and TV series by Neil Simon. To do that well and to make it interesting and attractive and funny will be a very challenging task. However, the final video needs to be only 4 or 5 minutes long, so a "straight" dramatic version is also a very doable task.

I want to encourage you to depart from the straight dramatic scene and do something to it or with it, to transform it in an interesting way. You can move so far from the original that no one would recognize it. You can come up with something entirely different. Like what? For starters, realize that you have a terrific opportunity to use your classmates as actors. You also have professional-caliber special effects software available to you. And finally, you have thousands upon thousands, almost two decades of models -- all the video/TV/movies/presentations you've ever seen.

Where will you get your ideas? Visualize it. Close your eyes and run the movie across the screen of your closed eyelids. Observe closely.

you'll get it from other people or from online resources -- Don't be afraid to steal, uh, that is, to emulate the models, to mix and match parts you take from here and there.

Contstraints for your video

To get this project to fit into a three-month semester, I have developed several constraints that you need to follow. "Constraints" in this sense are choices I have made for you in several areas where the trade-offs may not be so clear.

On the far end, YouTube won't let you upload a file larger than 2 GB or a video longer than ten minutes. On the near end, holding someone's attention for four or five minutes is not easy. More than that is even harder. In addition, you have only three months to write, produce, and edit this beast, and it's probably your first attempt at such an organized creative project, so .... Do yourself a favor and think short!

Yes, YouTube is full of random, spontaneous video clips. Yours won't be one of them. Holding up your cell phone's video camera for five minutes during a concert at HSBC Arena or during a Friday night drink-fest at a buddy's off-campus apartment and then slapping a title at the beginning before you upload it to YouTube is worth doing on a number of levels, but it isn't apprpriate for this course. If at the last minute you decide to "change everything" and do the taping without a script because there's no time, then you have what I call an "undocumented final video" on the Course page section about final grades.

At the beginning of the semester, all your friends in the dorm and back home will say, "Sure, I'll be happy to be in your video." But when it comes time to scheduling production days during March, it's just impossible to schedule around everyone's part-time job. It will be easier to trade with a classmate - "I'll act in yours if you run one of the cameras in mine."

Note that the syllabus leaves two full weeks of class time, one week on either side of Spring Break, for production. Thus, we have six hours of taping time right there. If you have a good shot list, we can do a lot of taping in one hour when we have the stage and two dozen students available for cast and crew.

If you look at some of the videos from Fall 2008 on your Matteo Ricci YouTube channel, you'll see that the video is still there but the audio has been removed because the copyright holder complained. In several cases, lack of music really hurts the video. Don't let that happen to yours. There is way too much wonderful, interesting music that you can use where that won't be a problem.

Similarly, your visual content in terms of nudity and violence should stay within the bounds of what could be shown on network TV during evening prime time.

However, your verbal content, that is, the ideas and views expressed, do not need to stay within those bounds. For verbal content, think in terms of the First Amendment. Avoid libel and slander, of course, unless it's clearly satirical. You have freedom of speech in this course, so feel free to excercise it!

Avoid any risks that could cause personal injury or destruction of property.

Toolkit -- hardware and software for this course

In this course, you will use cameras, lights, and microphones. You may use your own or borrow them from the College according to the sign-up sheet in the Huber lab -- see Jim or Steve. They or I will be happy to show you more about using them. I am also willing to work with you on location during your production.

You will also use, in addition to the usual email and browers, video and audio editing software. I recommend using Final Cut Pro or other Apple software. It is available in the Mac Lab in Huber 201. However, it is also quite acceptable, though more limiting, to use MovieMaker, which comes installed on most PCs, and Audacity for sound editing. If you have other software you would like to use, such as Adobe Premier, please let me know. Note that there is no reason for you to open Word for any reason whatsoever in this course.

If you have never used video and audio editing software before, please let me know. Unfortunately, our classroom (the Lecture Hall) does not come with computers for everyone. I will do several class days of demonstrating hardware and software, but that's no substitute for your hands on a keyboard. I will be happy to sit with you individually to help you with the software.

Overview of the Process

The creative process is as old as humanity. It's often a messy process and the tools and materials have changed, but the process is the same. It is a process that you have been through before, personally, many times, although you probably didn't use these terms to describe it.

Here is a chart and brief description of the phases of the creative process as we will follow it in this course:

The cream color is for parts of the process that are mostly words: concept, property, treatment and pre-distribution pitch.

The blue color is for parts that are mostly oral: the concept and property pitches.

The brown color is for parts that are mostly digital and hands-on: producing the vehicles for distribution.

Where do ideas for videos come from? Where will you get yours? (see above under Intro to Course)

analysis of video structure

Two strangers meet in a coffee shop and realize their whole lives have been leading up to this moment.

Who did what to whom, with whom, where and when? Two appealing characters, two other characters, here and now

analysis of scene structure

Pre-Production
Concept

Risky Business

In 25 words or fewer, what are you going to do for your video? It's perfectly OK if you write, "The first scene of the Odd Couple (female version) exactly as Neil Simon wrote it." I would also encourage you to do something that seems different, risky, ridiculous, impossible, beyond your fear

abilities, or just downright silly.

Visualize and describe.This is a time for divergent thinking, so go for it! I recommend that you write this pitch off-line and save it. Then copy and paste it into an email to me.

The audience for this concept pitch are the people who could fund it, work on making it, or watch it when it is finished. Your job is to present it to them enthusiastically. It's exactly like getting a job and having to enthusiastically represent a product or service to customers, suppliers, employees.

In the real world of media development, an agent often plays this role. The creative person -- the writer or director -- develops the proposal, passionately, and then the agent delivers it, dispassionately but enthusiastically.

Concept Pitches

For professional projects to proceed, they go through a series of checkpoints or gateways. Inside the organization, these checkpoints often involve competition. There's X amount of budget available, and the bosses ask for 2X or 3X worth of ideas to choose from. Outside the organization, these gateways involve venture capitalists, loan officers, and other people whose money or other resources you would like to use.

Your ability to not just survive in a job, but to thrive, may well depend on your ability to succinctly explain your ideas to others.

Ideas are, in reality, cheap and easy to find. The media capitals of the world are full of folks pitching concepts and properties. Your life is full of pitches (trailers, ads) for the finished songs and movies. Part of the function of the pitch is to keep you from having only one egg in your basket and too much depending on it.

If you fear pitching your stories to agents and producers, you're not alone. Many writers find pitching difficult. If they wanted to perform for an audience, they would not have chosen a solitary profession like writing....

Working writers often pitch their stories while they're in the midst of writing their screenplays. Even after they sell the script, they have to pitch it to the director and the actors. All successful screenwriters learn how to pitch effectively, it's part of the job description.

Pitching a movie or television idea in Hollywood is murder. A screenwriter walks into a room and has 15 seconds to tell what may be a feature-length story to a bunch of grown-ups who listen to stories all day long, told by the world’s most talented storytellers. While the screenwriter talks, the grown-ups check their e-mail, their stocks and their makeup. And when it’s all over, the screenwriter can only hope that the grown-ups will hand over a suitcase full of money and send the writer home to write it all down.

On February 1, you will get up in front of the class and say (or read) your 25-word concept. We will have time for some quick reactions.

We will hear all twenty-five in one hour, so you don't have time for more than your 25 words. The classic situation is the elevator pitch. You find yourself alone in an elevator, going up, with someone who has the power to make your dream come true, and he/she seems willing to listen to you at least until the elevator stops.

In this case, it would be a producer with a lot of money or a star actor who you'd love to play a part. You have 30 seconds. Pitch your concept.

At the other end of the process, this concept is the short description that will appear on the YouTube page to entice viewers to click and watch.

It is most important to remember that you can change this concept at any time, although the longer you take to do that, the harder it might be to catch up.

Obama vs. McCain 08 (rocky redone) - The character of Rocky will be played by John McCain and the Apollo Creed will be played by Barack Obama. There will be live scenes from debates and campaign speeches as well as video from Rocky that has faces of each candidate pasted over the characters from Rocky.

Examples of concept pitches

The story centers on a group of gossipy, high-society women who spend their days at the beauty salon and haunting fashion shows. The sweet, happily-wedded Mary Haines finds her marriage in trouble when shop girl Crystal Allen gets her hooks into Mary's man. Naturally, this situation becomes the hot talk amongst Mary's catty friends, especially the scandalmonger Sylvia Fowler, who has little room to talk - she finds herself on a train to Reno and headed for divorce right after Mary.

Wealthy Mary Haines is unaware her husband is having an affair with shopgirl Crystal Allen. Sylvia Fowler and Edith Potter discover this from a manicurist and arrange for Mary to hear the gossip. On the train taking her to a Reno divorce Mary meets the Countess and Miriam (in an affair with Fowler's husband). While they are at Lucy's dude ranch, Fowler arrives for her own divorce and the Countess meets fifth husband-to-be Buck. Back in New York, Mary's ex is now unhappily married to Crystal who is already in an affair with Buck. When Sylvia lets this story slip at a country club dinner, Crystal brags of her plans for a still wealthier marriage, only to find the Countess is the source of all Buck's money. Crystal must return to the perfume counter and Mary runs back to her husband.

The pitch for other genres would similarly summarize what the media consumer will see when the project is finished and what it's appeal will be.

Pre-Production
Treatments

If you don't have a script, we will not be able to plan your part of the production phase of the process. A script will let us find potential problems before they occur during shooting or when it is too late to solve them.

This is the most important document that you will produce for this course. If you get this "right", it will make everything else possible in the next two months. I put the "right" in quotes because I want to emphasize that there is no One Right Treatment. It is certainly something you can change, but it is not something you would "correct". So don't be afraid.

Start with your concept. Now think it through, imagine, envision. It's early May, three months from now. We're all sitting in the Lecture Hall. Your video is up next. There's this pause while everyone turns expectantly, hopefully, curiously toward the screen.

Use words, as many as you need, to help us now to see what you see. Complete sentences are good, but you can use lists of them or within them. You can write what looks more like a paragraph. Some questions to answer:

On each of these class days, we will discuss how you have decided to treat your concept. We will have about 5 minutes to devote to each of you. You should take the first half of that to stand in front of the class and propose your treatment. Pretend you need their approval of your time and budget to proceed, so "sell" the treatment to them. The second half, I will give you my reaction and I will ask some of your classmates for theirs.

In a nutshell, a treatment is a detailed outline of your film from start to finish - including all of your clever twists and turns. Some writers love them whilst others (usually the lazy ones) loathe them.

No matter what your view on treatments is, there is no mistaking that they are an immensely powerful tool for scriptwriters that force you into thinking about the path your story will take rather than focusing on the "cool scenes".

For the writers that prefer to skip this step and dive straight into the 1st draft of the screenplay, they tend to write really shit scripts which in turn make god-awful movies. It makes good sense to have a good, long think about your story before writing a script for your story.

Free Hugs Amsterdam - high concept, low-budget, but takes a couple of special actors

Trivia note: From Joe Halderman's point if view, he sold a treatment to David Letterman.

Halderman approached Letterman outside his home on Sept 9th offering to sell Letterman a screenplay treatment.

At the beginning of every media project, there is a need to define a desired treatment. Any concept can lend itself to a wide variety of successful treatments. A treatment outlines what the finished project will be about. For example, a music video could show, as a concept:

compelling images to complement the music in a more abstract but still purposeful way

each location or setting; where and when; indoor/outdoor, day/night -- list them all

each situation -- storyline at this location; what's happening there?

cast: characters/actors, costumes, props

crew: camera placements, microphone placements

pacing

tone, color, lighting

images, music, text (to be added in post-production)

Even though most treatment writers don't follow specific guidelines or structures, a well written treatment is one that can successfully communicate complete ideas to the other people, especially the money people, involved in the project.

Well done, a video treatment underlies the process of creating the production budget where items identified in the treatment are included in the budgeting process. It is a planning document.

In short, the treatment is a necessary phase of every project. It allows the production company -- that's you -- to communicate its ideas to the artists and it allows artists to make decisions regarding the direction of the project. The treatment also helps you write production budgets and gives artists clear expectations when committing to your project..

For someone who is inexperienced with making videos, the treatment will save time and help ensure consistency, and thus watchability.

The quotation below from Egan and Barry mentions "mock-ups or animatics". They are also known as storyboards.

Once the treatment is exactly where we want it to be, we work on mock-ups or animatics, which are the visual blueprint of how the video will go. truth is, no matter how great your descriptive style may be, a lot of folks really dig the added visuals to help them really get behind your idea. so knowing a little photoshop, grabbing some clip art from the web, and drafting up some rough visuals can be really worthwhile. once thats done, we send it all to whomever has approached us - the label, manager, band members, or all three. then the waiting begins....

Pre-Production
Scripts

We are going to take several class days to look at your scripts. That will give us about 15 minutes per script, on average, though some will take more time than others. It is important that you understand the value you can get out of listening to a discussion of someone else's script. If you're listening, you will get far more out of the 290 minutes we talk about everyone else's scripts than during the fifteen minutes that we talk about yours.

The script specifies what will be audible and visible on the screen when people watch your finished video.

In addition to the voices -- dialogue or narrative voice-over -- a shooting script will also note instructions about technical and dramatic elements such as sound effects or use of props.

The rule of thumb is one "page" (in the old-fashioned sense of am 8 1/2 x 11 inch piece of paper) of shooting script per minute of screen time. If you are aiming for a four- or five-minute video, you should write a script for about five or six minutes that you can tighten when you edit. Aim then for five or six pages (if it were printed out).

As with all our documents for this process, your script can be edited at any time.

--- This document will have all the words that the actors in your video will speak, including voice-overs. It will also have any text, if any, that will appear on the screen. It may also have some stage directions. script

Script formats

Your scripts will probably be best expressed by using one or several of these formats:

This format will work well for a documentary video or video essay that relies largely on a voice-over narrative.

traditional dramatic play format for dialogue (example on the right and your Odd Couple script)

This format will work well for a scripted video with multiple characters interacting.

lists and tables. For example, your table could have these column headers: scene number, scene name, time, setting, actors, action, basically an expanded shot list (see below)

This format will work well for a music video where the music determines your structure and the lyrics are half your script; the other half is the images we'll see on the screen: setting, actors, action

storyboards - especially if you are doing a mash-up, your script may resemble or be able to use storyboarding techniques. Here's what the Wikipedia has to say about them:

Storyboards are ... graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of previsualizing a motion graphic or interactive media sequence. ... A film storyboard is essentially a large comic of the film or some section of the film produced beforehand to help film directors, cinematographers and television commercial advertising clients visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. Often storyboards include arrows or instructions that indicate movement.

In creating a motion picture with any degree of fidelity to a script, a storyboard provides a visual layout of events as they are to be seen through the camera lens. And in the case of interactive media, it is the layout and sequence in which the user or viewer sees the content or information.

Note this phrase: "find potential problems before they occur." If you can't draw, you are welcome to use words to describe the scenes.

Pre-Production
Production lists

How how to start thinking like a maker of media instead of just as a consumer of media.

cast

crew

settings / locations

costumes, props

cameras - #, source

lighting

microphones

budget - if any

shooting schedule - days, times, location, people

Along with your script, these lists will give me the information you and I need to move into the production phase prepared to make the best use of our time.

Pre-Production
Shot List

There are two common formats for this list. One format is the order in which the shots will appear in the final video but numbered in the order in which you will shoot them. The other format is the order in which they will be shot given the demands of location, actors' schedules, continuity, etc.

Both of them give you a list to follow when you get all the actors and crew ready at the location. What do you do next? Follow your shot list.

Break the script into scenes, the scenes into sequences, and the sequences into shots. For example, the scene is the judge's table right after the second dancer during the So You Think You Can Dance competition. The sequence is where Judge 1 disagrees with Judge 2 and jumps up from his chair. The first shot is the two of them together from the front while Judge 2 talks. The second shot is a close-up of Judge 1 reacting to something Judge 1 said. The third shot is Judge 1 jumping out of his chair. The fourth shot is the reaction of Judge 2.

Email these lists to me by February 26. If I approve it, your will be finished with the pre-production process and ready to begin the production process. You will be in excellent shape to make good use of everyone's time during production, when on stage, studio, or location.

Production
Production Values

Light

Video cameras love light and there is only so much you can do later during the post-production editing process. Your best best it to pay a lot of attention to lighting during the actual taping.

1 - on a stage like our Lecture Hall or studio like our TV studio on the lower level of Main.

2 - outside on a day with no sun but only light cloud cover; lots of light and no shadows.

3 - inside in a big, well-lit space like a gym where the lights are out of the way and tend to cancel out the shadows.

Every camera has a couple of buttons or menu items to adjust for lighting conditions. Be especially careful to make the distinction between yellow (incandescent) and blue (fluorescent) light indoors. Also, be careful if you are using more than one camera that they are all set similarly.

You should also be able to push a button or turn a wheel to increase/decrease the amount of light coming in. In the sun, you want to decrease it until you don't see any more blown-out spots on the white colors in the scene. In the dark of night, you probably want to increase it as far as you can.

Video cameras on automatic focus make note of the brightest thing in front of them and focus on that. The human eye, however, especially in combination with the human brain, sees things differently. Thus, if you shoot a scene indoors of two people talking with a wall lamp in the background, your eye will see a lot of detail in their faces. The camera, however, will have the lamp perfectly in focus and the people's faces dark and murky. Switching to manual focus can solve the murky faces problem, but only getting rid of the lamp's light can solve the dark faces problem.

Don't point at a light, whether indoors or outdoors at night, and especially the sun or sun glancing off metal surfaces. Turn it out, move the light, move the actors, move the camera.

The College has a light kit that you can borrow. It is designed to be used indoors on location.

In general, point the camera away from the light and have the light bounce off the actors' faces.

Please note that these guidelines are for well-lit scenes. If you want murky suspense, or a dazzling washed-out ski scene, go for it!

Sound

All video cameras have a built-in microphone, but that doesn't mean you should use it.

If you are taping an interview in a quiet room such as the College TV studio with the camera on a tripod two feet in front of the person being interviewed, then the microphone in the camera will work just fine. At the other end of the spectrum would be trying to capture the dialogue between two basketball players running down the court after the go-ahead shot during a championship game. They're moving and panting in a delirious sold-out gym.

Where will they be placed? The one could be on a boom held toward or over the actors. Each actor could have one clipped to a lapel. Those clip mics are called lavalier mics.

How will the sound be captured? The shotgun or boom mic could be directly fed into the camera. Or the sound could be recorded separately and then synced with the video. If each voice is its own computer file (.wav or .mp3, for example), then you can compensate for almost any problem with the software during post-production.

Another option is to add the voices later either by dubbing (matching the orginal) or voice-over.

Camera placements

Your first and almost only choice is to mount the camera on a tripod and hold it still.

Avoid zooming during a shot. Turn (swivel) the camera very slowly, if at all. Be very careful about moving the whole camera or camera operator during a shot. The camera is not (usually) a character.

Your next best choice is to rest the camera on a shelf, ledge, wall, rock, or piece of furniture to get the angle you want.

Only on rare occasions should you use a hand-held camera. Have good reason to do so. And no, you won't be able to hold it still enough.

Today's audiences expect a lot of action on the screen, quick cuts from one shot to another. Or you may have a complicated set, as we did for the So You Think You Can Dance video that we taped in the Lecture Hall last fall. We had three cameras: one in the center of the audience pointed at Joe while he danced concentrating on head close-ups and his upper body, one on the judges, and the third from off to the side concentrating on full-body shots and his feet.

Campus Locations

Several locations on campus are optimal for taping your videos. They need to be reserved ahead of time.

The lighting is terrific and the sound can be easily made so. It is large, giving a lot of options for camera placements and active scenes. On the downside, you have to bring cameras.

The best all-around option for lighting and sound. The only option for green-screening. It already has multiple cameras. The stage can be decorated in any way you want. On the downside, it is small.

This is the new space on the fourth floor of the Main Building. It has great natural lighting and the sound is pretty good. I'm curious to see how it works as a production space.

The lighting will be fine, and the acoustics may be good enough that you don't need microphones.

The lighting will be a challenge and you will want to use a boom or shotgun mic.

Post-Production
Video Editing

Most of the videos on YouTube are edited with Windows Movie Maker. Its big advantage is that is comes free on almost all computers that have the Windows operating system, and it is available as a free download from Microsoft for everyone else. Its big disadvantage is its limited options. For example, if you want to do anything at all complicated with music and voice, you need a separate audio editor. Most people use Audacity because it is free and very powerful.

At the other end of the spectrum is Apple's Final Cut. Some of the first-run feature films that you might have seen at the Regal were edited with Final Cut, so its big advantage is its power and amazing array of options. Its big disadvantage is its high price, $999 at the Apple Store. That's for the whole suite because, like Movie Maker, Final Cut is best used with some other software, included in Final Cut Studio:

In addition, you may find it helpful, depending on your project, to edit some still images before you import them into your video editor.

Post-Production
Opening Titles and Closing Credits

Your video needs to have a title and perhaps some other information at the beginning and credits at the end, sort of like book covers or the handshake at the beginning and end of a business encounter.

Distribution
completed videos

On this last class day before Thanksgiving, I invite you to come to class with your whole video project, in whatever stage it is in, to get some feedback. If you aren't very far along, this opportunity could be the spark you need. If you're finished or almost finished, this opportunity could be helpful for you to see others reacting to your work. Wherever you are in the editing process, make a .wmv or .mov file and upload it to our YouTube channel or bring it to class on a USB drive.

By Monday, November 17, you should upload to our channel at YouTube one .wmv or .mov or .mpg file, that is, one playable video. Our channel name is matteoricci and the password is santa13. After you log on, click on one of the "upload video" buttons. That will take you to a screen where you are asked some questions about your video: Title, Description, Video Category (genre), and Tags. Tags are keywords used to help people find your video.

Note also that there are limits to your upload: ten minutes of video and one gigabyte of file size.

I will demonstrate this process in class. More details to follow.

This very short video should have your opening title sequence, a short clip of perhaps twenty seconds (any twenty seconds) from your video, and your closing credits. You will learn the mechanics of publishing it in this trial run so that you will not have anxiety or trouble when it comes to uploading your final video.

Opening title sequence. At a minimum, you should display the video's title in your opening sequence. If you look at just the beginnings of YouTube videos, you will see a variety of approaches to this opening sequence. Here's a video with the title and the maker's name. The title starts over black and remains for a few seconds after the video itself begins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKcXQlJMe_k

A more elaborate title sequence might be like this one, which first announces the production company and then has an animated title.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLfsG8XKWfw

Closing credits sequence. This should tell us where you got your media assets if you didn't make them yourself. In the case of the music, identify the titles and musicians. The closing credits are also an opportunity to thank the people who helped you, cast, crew, or just inspiration. They are also a good place to put a date and a copyright notice if you are concerned about such things.

In class, we will look at every one of your test segments and discuss some of the choices you made. You will also be able to see what other students have done so that you can make changes to yours.

online video resources

Each of you is going to take us on a tour of an online video resource. I am suggesting the sites below for you to sign up for, and I hope you bring me similar sites that aren't on my list.

Music promos are designed to grab your attention, capture the imagination and keep you entertained with each and every frame. Sequence Post-Production shows you how to create a dramatic and energetic piece of video work.

Blender -- free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems

production

First Light Movies How to Make a Film - funds and inspires young people, throughout the UK, to make films reflecting the diversity of their lives. - Lora

MonkeySee's Produce Your Own How-To Video - watch all nine of the videos yourself but show us just six or seven minutes of highlights.

Izzy Video - the video podcast that shows you how to shoot and edit better video - show us six or seven minutes of highlights -

post-production

WindowsMoviemakers.net Tutorials - pick a couple of advanced topics that look interesting to you

iMovie - from these several dozen video tutorials, pick seven or eight minutes of highlights

Special Effects FX software

music

property rights and public policy

burning discs

making interactive DVD's

torrents

non-YouTube video sites

mash-ups

education

Institute for Multimedia Literacy's Multimedia Literacy for Middle School Teachers - how early should it be taught in schools? Primary school? Middle School? Concentrate on words in school and save the visual literacy for college? or maybe it shouldn't be taught at all?

Few schools encourage and train students to use new media. Thus, many parents make up for that by sending their children to summer camps that specialize in having the campers play with media. MySummerCamp.com's list of a hundred such camps.

I am also sure that individual teachers in middle schools (but probably not primary schools - yet!) are encouraging individual students to pursue their interest in media outside the classroom.

Adobe, a company that makes new media tools, has a program called Youth Voices. - Lindsay

Listen Up! is "a youth media network that connects young video producers and their allies to resources, support, and projects in order to develop the field and achieve an authentic youth voice in the mass media".

Media literacy connects the curriculum of the classroom with the curriculum of the living room. Making these connections requires an educationally sound framework and structure — while leaving room for open-ended inquiry and the excitement of discovery.

I'm saying, "Teach children-beginning in elementary school-to make TV." And as they learn to make television, they will also learn most of the other lessons, values and basic skills we want them to.

Model Videos

The Mix and Mash Film Contest invites you to create and remix Creative Commons and Public Domain digital content into a short video. All entries will be judged by a panel of experts and the best films will be screened at the National Film Theatre and featured on Google Video UK.

Mumblecore is an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s.[1][2] It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors.

Machinima

Buffalo

Delaware Park, the waterfront, Medaille campus, the metro station, the houses/gardens of Parkside neighborhood, tombstones in the cemetery, a College sporting event, a College cultural event

By limiting his focus to people from four cities — Luverne, Minn.; Mobile, Ala.; Waterbury, Conn.; and Sacramento, Calif. (north, south, east, west) — Burns weaves a controlled, throat-grabbing narrative that is as intimate as it is relevant to every soldier, family member and American who lived during those perilous times, and after.

The War is not simply an accumulation of war stories. It is a visual and oral history of a particular time as seen through the eyes of those who fought and those who were left behind. It is a study of people, here and overseas, sacrificing their lives and lifestyles for a common, worthy cause.

"... a bottom-up look at the greatest cataclysm in American history, in human history, focusing on the experiences of so-called ordinary people."

"You can't be encyclopedic," Burns said. "Not even an encyclopedia can be encyclopedic. We could have done 50, even 100 hours on the Second World War and not done it all. So what you do is like a poem. You have to decide what it's going to be.

"It's like sculpture. It's like music. ... You polish and polish and try to get it to where you want it to be, but you also try to think in the mind of a viewer who is intelligent and willing to commit his attention. We need to serve that. We need to reward that."

From previous semesters:

The video is of gang members (Bloods) doing dances only known to those members and they do them to intimidate other people and/or gangs. The reason why I picked this video is because of the background music. Without it,it is just a bunch of blood members throwing up signs and dancing. What the video did for me was made me laugh the whole time. The caption says "This just goes to show you that the right music makes even the toughest people look ridiculous," and it is true, because in a different context and without the music, to some people, seeing those guys do those things would frighten most people, but with the goofy music, it just makes people laugh and realize how ridiculous it really is.

Mid-course review

You've probably learned more than you realize because much of this learning takes time to sink in. Especially since you probably have adjust several mental models about how organizations and industries compete, it will take a period of time using the models to fully learn what you can do with your business plan.

This is a good time to reflect on what you've learned so far and its value to you.

In response to this message, list the half-dozen most important or useful things you've learned so far in this course. Explain one in detail, the more detail the better, especially about your mental models. I will not share your personal response with the class, so feel free to write a lot.

I recommend that you compose your reply off-line and save it before you copy-and-paste it into the form below.

Shot number	Scene 2 Sequence 3 Shot 1
Action	Judge 2 talking, Judge 1 listening
Camera instructions	No pan
Dialogue	JUDGE 2: That was the most terrific dance I've seen in years!
Other audio	Contestant gasps, audience shrieks
Visual effects	none

The Syllabus

GEN 230 Creative Expression: Theater - Spring 2010