Ira Glass on Storytelling

The other media production teacher and I often talk about how our kids technical abilities are ahead of their storytelling skills. We can teach them to set up a shot, improve their sound and edit what they shoot. We haven't been as successful at teaching them to tell a story.

Often our best storytellers are our best writers. The students who have done well in Creative Writing or their English classes. These typically are not the kids attracted to our program though.

I've been putting some thought into this and doing a little reading and web surfing on the topic. Came across these videos on YouTube of Ira Glass, This American Life, talking about storytelling as it relates to video and radio. He has some good information here.

Storytelling #1: Two Building Blocks of a good story.



Storytelling #2: Finding a Good Story is time consuming.



Storytelling #3: It takes time to get good at your craft.



Storytelling #4: The pitfalls for beginners




[Image captured from This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/About_Staff.aspx]

Learning After Effects

As a guy who is going to soon tackle Adobe's After Effects, I found this article encouraging. Kevin McMahon did the same thing recently and came up with these "5 tips for learning After Effects".

1. Know your DV basics first.
2. Know what After Effects is (and is not) for
3. Know just enough of theAE keyboard shortcuts to be dangerous - and realize that this does not mean that many.
4. Start simple, and I mean super simple.
5. Use the wealth of AE resources - and take a class.

This is my summer learning project. Thanks for the plan of attack.

[Image: "Al Gunn pondering the computer"; Modified in Comic Life: No rights reserved]

Who controls television content?

Neatorama had an interesting piece recently called, "Who owns what on television?" I was facinated to see how a few corporations control most of the big media outlets. I think I probably already knew this, but seeing it all laid out was pretty eye-opening. If I were teaching at the moment, which I'm not cause it's the middle of summer vacation, I'd bring this up as a topic of discussion.

As an example, the graphic here, shows all the stations owned and operated by Time Warner.

I'll bookmark this page and come back to it in September to show my media classes.




[Image captured from Neatorama: http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/07/who-owns-what-on-television/]