NYT Learning Blog - Ethnography Curriculum

Photography is a really wonderful tool for teaching art, science, and humanities.
"How do writers create or defy popular images of settings? What is ethnography, and how can it be used to reveal the meanings of places? In this lesson, students consider the power of place in their own lives, and then execute an ethnographic research project that dispels clichéd notions about where they live."
Click here for the curriculum
and
Click here for a similar curriculum over at the California Council for the Humanities.
Both are great.

Movies for Young Urban Filmmakers

The first step to becoming a filmmaker is to watch great works then analyze and critique them. I have found these films to be especially effective when teaching storytelling, composition, and editing. Some of these films are Oscar winners, some are not. Many of them are urban cult classics. You can even ask your students to let you know which music videos have been influenced by these works.

Blood In, Blood Out - Three brothers, their choices, the consequences. (also called Bound by Blood)
City of God - Gangs in Brazil. The documentary about Favelas that's on the US dvd is also very educational. A nice contrast is to show this film with Black Orpheus.
The Conversation - A sound tech regrets the job he's done. Coppola directs.
Cooley High/Boyz in the Hood - An African-American High School story. Cooley High is set in Chicago in the 1970's and written by the same guy who co-created Good Times. Boyz in the Hood is essentially a remake/modernized version set in LA in the 80's.
Made in America: Crips & Bloods - This documentary by Stacey Peralta presents valuable perspective and also shows some great CG (After Effects, Motion, etc.) technique.
Do the Right Thing - Great example of issue filmmaking and also had a huge influence on music videos. Shows a wide range of camera angles and moves.
Klute - 1972 Oscar winner about prostitution. Deep. Shows how the camera can be used effectively when NOT moving.
Mi Familia - LA's Chicano history told in a classic Hollywood structure.
Requiem for a Dream/Trainspotting/Gridlock'd - Movies about drug addicts. Three very different takes. A good question to ask is which one is the most realiztic and why?
Scarface - If you have to ask, you'll never know.
To Be and To Have - A beautiful documentary about a group of schoolchildren and their teacher in rural France. In filmmaking, many times simple is better.
Visions of Light - Documentary about the job of the Cinematographer/Director of Photography. Dials in detail that students didn't realize was there.
The Warriors - Cult classic. Everything old is new again.

Be sure to screen all of these films in advance, many of them contain adult language or themes that may not be appropriate to your school/program. However, you can also show a less offensive scene or portion of the film for discussion.

Finessing Final Cut Pro - Filters

Back in the day when I was a film student, I used to attend luncheons at Tiffen. For those who don't know, they are the premiere filter company for still photography and motion pictures. At these informal gatherings I learned all sorts of tricks about in camera color correction (81 EF anyone?), gradation, image enhancement, polarizing, etc.
Unfortunately for teachers/students these filters are expensive and are sometimes not available in the same sizes as prosumer cameras. They also require some in depth experimentation that pre-professionals are not always willing to do.
I recently found out that Tiffen has developed a digital suite of filters for use in Photoshop, Aperture, and Final Cut Pro. Tiffen DFX can be thought of as a toolkit that will encourage students to experiment. I can also see some nice applications in a Physics class - to teach about how filtration can affect light. And for the camera pro's out there, there's even a split diopter option that will allow you to re-create a shallow depth of field.
These filters are available for $100 for the still programs and $600 for FCP and well worth the investment. It's possible that you could even get an educational discount if you sent them a note from your school.
Oh, and if you're program is strapped for cash, here's a link to an article over at Creative Cow with some free Final Cut Pro plugins. Nothing as extensive as Tiffen's DFX, but some fun stuff.

Learning Film Making Online

Courtesy of Ken Radio
Great site that provide a real-world education of the complex world of motion picture production through a series of easy-to-understand, yet comprehensive videos, workbooks and resources. By partnering with industry leaders in the creative and technological fields, we strive to teach real, cutting edge techniques to filmmakers around the globe. We also seek to build an online community of filmmakers to help forge long-term connection between filmmakers from all disciplines.
http://www.powerfilmmaking.com

Replace Cameras and Laptops with Smartphones?

Industry Pitching Cellphones as a Teaching Tool:
"On Tuesday, Digital Millennial will release findings from its study of four North Carolina schools in low-income neighborhoods, where ninth- and 10th-grade math students were given high-end cellphones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software and special programs meant to help them with their algebra studies.

The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problems and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch. The study found that students with the phones performed 25 percent better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes."

This article is mainly about the (potential) benefits of smartphones. However, self-evaluation through VIDEO has long been proven effective. This component could certainly be executed with many different phones - and would not require Windows Mobile.

Using Digital to Make the "Old" Technology - Books

What Kids Can Do is a wonderful non-profit in Road Island that is helping kids to publish amazing books. Look. See. Be Inspired.

A Little Old, But I'm Loving This Post

I'm so enjoying watching all the videos in this Archive. It's from the CR Blog which covers "News and Views on Visual Communication from the Writers and Readers of Creative Review" - a trade magazine in England.
The State of Music Video

Cool Software - Mac Only

Create Polaroid™-like pictures over at the Poladroid Project.
Samples are here

Meant to put this up long ago...

If you teach photography or your video class includes lighting, Strobist is one of the best resources available online. Here's their basic 101 video.



I've seen plenty of sites try to do the same for filmmaking 101 - and fail. They all seem to be too advanced or too juvenile. What do you think? If you have a resource to recommend, add it in the comments.

Strobist: Lighting 101

Cool Photo Contest (Film, not Digital)

Brian Auer is running a very cool contest over at the Epic Edits Weblog that could be of interest to both Teachers and Students.

The $50 Film Camera: "My main objective for the project as a whole is to show other photographers that film photography can be very inexpensive and exciting. For whatever reason, there’s a popular belief that film photography is expensive and tedious. But through your participation in this project, we can disprove that point and show everybody just how great film can be."
1. Buy a Camera
2. Shoot & Develop Your Film
3. Write a Review of Your Camera
4. Publish a Photo of Your Camera
5. Publish an Entire Roll of Photos
6. Submit Your Link on the Form
...and, if you're lucky, WIN!!!

The Deadline is September 12, 2008

Fun Idea for P2P Learning

This is a nice little lesson plan that has 6th Graders making a project for 2nd Graders. I do wish there was a link to some student samples...

Techlearning :Making Flip Books to Improve Reading : "Each sixth grade child will take a basic picture book and turn it into a digital picture book using GarageBand, iTunes, scanners, and iMovie."

How to Reduce Camera Shake - 6 Techniques

How to Reduce Camera Shake - 6 Techniques: "In this post photographer Natalie Norton explores 6 ways you can hand hold lenses at low apertures and low shutter speeds and still avoid blurry images caused by camera shake."
- Thanks Lifehacker

Disposable Camera Projects

Sometimes I find that my students take better pictures with disposable cameras than with digital cameras. (It's all still digital to me - I have the images put onto CD and import them into the computer regardless of origination.)

So I thought I'd do some research to find some cool new projects that would incorporate the 'old' technology of film while using a typical educator's budget. (Disposable cameras are almost 30 years old, after all.) Here's what I found:
stranger photos have happened
cameramail cameras
camera belt
diy ring flash
add a fisheye
kite camera
stereo camera in stereo
(my friend did this recently with her students - absolutely brilliant work)
double take camera
diy high speed photography
or, buy a kit for $120
or, curiously strong diy

And one cool project for a 'disposable' video camera. (Now known as flip cameras.)
camcorder rocket project

DIY Resource

Looking for some ideas for a student project with disposable cameras, I found this site: Camera Hacker: Hacks.
Some of the info is old, but there are some useful tutorials on building soft lights, and both bicycle and car camera mounts.

Everyone's Talking About...

This week I spotted this technology in an article on Wired, but I've also found articles on Techlearning and, of course, Cnet. So, I did what any modern girl would do and searched Flickr Photos and found one Flickr Group - called the ChumbyChums.

The object of my infatuation is a Chumby. It's been available for less than a year. Once I saw the company site, I remembered that I'd heard about it about 6 months ago, went on the site and didn't see anything to get excited about. But I was only seeing it then as an out-of-the-box tech toy.

Turns out it's customizable in many ways...which means it could very well be a great tool for teaching. (It connects to your wi-fi network, has a touch screen and runs widgets from all the major sites. Some blogs are also saying it has an accelerometer inside and maybe even a built in GPS? But you can also take the electronics out of the casing and hotwire your Chumby to things like a small engine or embed it inside a teddy bear.)

Anyone want to hack together a Chumby, a Tonka Truck, and a Camera and have some fun geomapping the neighborhood? What other ways would you, could you use it in your digital classroom?

(By the way, my guess is Melissa's been getting a lot of hits lately.)

Flickr Adds Video

From the official Blog:
Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and “soon” is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.

90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.

Hopefully this doesn't mean that schools will all close down Flickr access like they've done with YouTube (hassle) and Myspace (helpful - although anyone can get around blocks).

My New Playground

We have a student who needs their own, individual project. So I'm building a series of exercises that will allow him to explore some of the issues going on in his life - inspired by the film Tarnation. Part of the plan is to have him use the built-in camera on one of our iMacs to make a self-portrait using stop motion. So I went hunting to find an example and found this instead...Boinx Software - iStopMotion 2 - Examples

Fun stuff. Now I have lots of ideas for projects for all ages!

Otherwise known as Participatory Video

Journalism in the Hands of the Neighborhood - New York Times: "After a free-flowing discussion about the kind of news they see and read in mainstream outlets, the group of about 15 was encouraged by the class’s three teachers to suggest their own story ideas, a few of which they will turn into five-minute video segments by the end of the eight-week class. A pattern quickly emerged: proposed topics included gun control, violence in schools, as well as crime against cab drivers."

Shooting Underwater

Lifehacker How To: DIY Waterproof Camera Enclosure

We also used to just use a fish tank. Put the camera inside (under a towel just-in-case) and shoot at water level. Nice Jaws type effect.

How News is Handling the Video Revolution

Putting Candidates Under the Videoscope:
"Mr. Conroy, whose job title is “off-air reporter,” (because he does not normally appear on television) is one of many young journalists hired by the networks to follow the candidates across the country, filing video and blog posts as they go. Originally hired to cut expenses — their cost is a fraction of a full television crew’s — these reporters, also called “embeds,” have produced a staggering amount of content, especially video. And in this election cycle, for the first time, they are able to edit and transmit video on the fly.
As a result, the embeds have changed the dynamic of this year’s election, making every unplugged and unscripted moment on the campaign trail available for all to see."