On advertising and teaching...

I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of linking advertising with teaching. If we are being overly reductive, both teaching and advertising are about motivating people. True. However, I believe you have to be rather cynical about human nature in order for advertising to be successful. When practiced at its best, advertising plays upon the basest of human instincts, often subliminally, to motivate people to do things or acquire things they often don't need. Contrasting this to teaching, where we overtly (attempt to) motivate people to engage new information and construct knowledge and experience from it. To be sure, there are teachers who are cynical about their pedagogy, their students, and the impact of their work, but we can agree that these are not effective teachers.

Film Project: Sense

Directors Commentary

I went through several iterations of this project. My initial concept was to capture the sense of hurrying up to something, then slowing down to enjoy it. I spent two evenings filming sunsets, and created three vastly different films. I spent a lot of time on the first iteration working on the technical nuances of the time-lapse. This freed me up to spend more time on the aesthetic qualities on the second iteration (which you can view below). Feedback from my test audience (read: wife) indicated that the concept was too expansive, and I should focus on something simpler.

The move towards a simpler concept was made easier when I re-read the directions, and realized my film was 5 times the suggested length. My new concept was the sense of time passing. I selected a specific segment of music that maintained a steady rhythm and was a little repetitive.

One aspect that I believe truly lends towards the concept is the audio recording of shorebirds (which was taken from the previous night's recording).  The shorebirds are heard in real-time while the visual is running at approximately 70x real-time.  I think this creates a slight cognitive dissonance, however it may be too subtle to have any real effect on the casual observer. It seems to me that I've seen this effect in movies and television before where the background noise plays normally during a sped-up time lapse shot.

Another impression you might draw from their piece is the sense of something drawing to a close, due to the visual of the sunset. This is an unintentional byproduct of significantly shortening the length of the film beween drafts v2 and v3. I wouldn't necessarily find fault with this assumption, but the fact that the music is steady throughout (rather than tapering off) and the street lights on the shore (right side) continue to pulse might give a different impression.

One regret I have is in the framing of the shot. In order to begin the film with the sun as high as possible in the frame, I was forced to tilt up, cutting off the boardwalk below and its constant stream of walkers, bicyclists, rollerbladers, and other revelers. The visual effect of these people flowing past along the bottom of the frame might have had an substantial impact on the general sense being conveyed by the piece.


Draft v2.1:

On filmmaking and teaching...

Two things jumped out at me from this week's readings with regard to teaching. First, Paul Hirsch, a renowned film editor, spoke about how using a split-screen in film will detach the audience emotionally from a scene, and engage them only intellectually. This inspired a thought that often, a successful lesson  will frame the information so that it resonates with the student emotionally. This can be done through project-based learning or other types of lessons where students are creating things. When a student creates or builds something, they are usually emotionally invested into it, and that is more likely to stay with them over time. Experiential learning is another way students can be emotionally tied to the things they learn through the cycle of: experience, reflection, and application of information.

The second thing that stood out came from the site on television journalism.  The article suggests that the journalist forms the information into an easy to understand package, and let the audience draw inferences and form opinions. This is similar to a lecture/discussion type of situation where the teacher's role is to frame the relevant information in a way the students can understand so they can inquire, research, synthesize their understanding, and hopefully transfer the knowledge to other areas.

2 Minute Moment: Amon Tobin