WHAT
Working together in your assigned groups of 4-5 people, you will create a video around 10 minutes long on the theme of "TV Tomorrow." Determine an imaginary date between 10 and 100 years in the future and create a project reporting on, analyzing, or embodying some aspect of "television" (whatever it may be then). It might take the form of a how-to, a news story, a documentary, a promotion, a review, a fan commentary, or simply a sample of contemporary programming. As with the last project, you will be evaluated based on the incorporation of course material in inventive ways, the originality of your critical perspective, and the effectiveness of your communication in the video medium. However, in this case you aren't required to use the video essay format or include explicit narration of your claims. You can mobilize the artistic style of your choice to make a speculative argument about the evolution of television drawing on the ideas and methodologies we've covered.
WHY
In this course, we're learning about the history, technology, form, ideologies, and industry of television through various scholarly approaches that illuminate its present-day constitution as a medium. To extend our work, you are asked to imagine how TV will change over the next decade/century (or even what TV will be in the future – will mass media as we know it still exist?) based on concrete aspects of its structure and development that we've studied. By creating online videos about TV for this class, you're already part of television's evolution, and by collaborating on video production, you can gain further insight into the construction of TV rhetoric and experiences.
WHERE
The procedure and resources for this project are similar to the last video, and I'll include them again in the attached handout. Because you'll be working on this over spring break, when many of you are traveling, it's particularly important for you to strategize about how to accommodate people's schedules, divide up the labor and plan the workflow, and collaborate long-distance using email, IM, shared documents, etc. Also, there may be high demand for MCM's camcorders during this period, so you should let David Udris know in advance if you'd like to check one out for any filming.
WHEN
This is the class schedule for the week after spring break:
- Tuesday April 3, 12pm: NO CLASS + VIDEOS DUE (either post them online or send me the file usinghttp:/
/ free.mailbigfile.com or similar) - Tuesday April 3, 7pm: screening and discussion of videos
- Thursday April 5, 12pm: additional discussion and project post-mortem
- Thursday/Friday: NO SECTIONS
