Suffice it to say two things:
At this point, we offer each of the following contestants 48 hours (until 16:30 PST 2009 February 5) to send a ranking of their top three picks to dan@mrmeyer.com (excluding their own). A ranking seems almost vulgar in light of all this great introspection and design but these prizes won’t give themselves away, etc.
I like not having the scale shown on these. Full confession, I did not track all of this data, so some of the numbers are guessed. My personal favorite slide is the one with the least fact behind it and my least favorite is the one where I can tell you the numbers exactly. Go figure.
… this year I used the opportunity to play around with Photoshop – something I never take the time to do.
With Sarah, our first child, born this year — her arrival and impact on our lives defines 2008. These 4 slides show just some of what’s been happening so far.
I’m going to side with Don Norman, and say that In a proper design, both are important. Though, if there is some imperfection, I think that having beautifully laid out information that is incomprehensible is worse than an eyesore that tells a good story.
I only had two infographics. Why? I don’t keep a spreadsheet with the minutiae of my life. I know that some consider this useful, or therapeutic. In my family, it usually comes with a three letter acronym diagnosis from the DSM IV. No aspersions on Dan or Mr. Feltron, but I’m not into that.
I’m slightly disappointed with this set of slides I made because they don’t tell a story. My slides from last year (2007) told a story – of moving to NYC and changing careers. There was text which explained the stages of my year. This year my slides – hastily done – don’t tell a coherent story.
Luckily I’m just dorky enough to keep track of a few data sets of interest to me. I was also lucky to have a snow day today- otherwise these would probably not be complete.
This Snarkmarket post, proposing an updated liberal arts degree for the 21st-century, would seem to be up the alley of everyone on my reading list:
I think the best way to think about this is not to think of the “new” liberal arts as supplanting the “old,” but as a complementary set, like painting, architecture, and sculpture as the new, humanist plastic arts during the Renaissance. Like the trivium and quadrivium, we have the octet of “modern” liberal arts and a set of newer concerns.
They’re looking for contributors to a book.
Adding a music track to film used to be a technically strenuous task requiring an optical printer to run a transparent strip alongside your film print. Now, your computer’s stock video editor (iMovie or Windows Movie Maker), VoiceThread, or PhotoStory will import a track from your iTunes library in seconds. Here, again, we have conquered the technical hurdle but we have underestimated the height of this particular creative hurdle.
When you make videos, vodcasts, and montages, you are attempting to create meaning.
You create meaning – whether that’s a thesis or a tone – when you write scripts, cast actors, place cameras, use lights, direct actors, and edit shots. Not one of those creative tasks is value neutral. If you can align each of those creative tasks to your thesis or tone, then music will be redundant at best, distracting at worst, serving only to remind your audience that they are watching a movie.
In our classrooms, when we make movies, we write a sloppy plot outline, a soft script, we act unskillfully, direct unskillfully, edit unskillfully, and then trowel a soundtrack onto our movie to fill the gap between what it is and what we wanted it to be. We wanted something buoyant so we add Louis Armstrong. We wanted to convey menace so we add John William’s soundtrack to Jaws, or the Creative Commons-licensed equivalent. When we let our students use music in their videos, we let them outsource the truly difficult creative work to industry professionals.
Four Illustrative Examples
Harmless Anecdote
I witnessed a montage at ILC 2008 featuring a Frankenstein medley of “Highway to the Danger Zone,” “Ride of the Valkyries,” “Dare You To Move,” “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” “New Soul,” and “Requiem for a Dream,” the lyrics and songs straining to carry the weight which the photos, themselves, couldn’t carry, photos of students unboxing laptops.
Far better there, to play ambient audio of the students excitedly unboxing their laptops or of student testimonials and, beneath that, if absolutely necessary, a track that functions not as an emotional signpost (“hey hey! feel happy! yeah, you!”) but as an emotional lubricant, something pleasant but inexpressive on its own.
Finally
If your students can demonstrate that all of their creative decisions from pre-production through editing support their thesis or tone, and they still need music, then let them have at it. Otherwise, you’re letting them off easy and they need to cut Louis Armstrong in on the grade.
BTW: Ken Loach, director, winner of Palmes d’Or:
I think film music that tells you what to think is cheap — the film should do that without that prompting.