Disney
Last week we watched a film that critiques the racism, sexism, and every other bad ism of many Disney films from it’s creation until present day. The film made several valid points, but I took it with a grain of salt as the film obviously had a bias to sell. Some of their examples were stretched a little too far, also. I didn’t agree that some of the thing that were presented as sexist or racist were actually so. Also I disagreed that children viewing these films would be scarred and grow up to be racists, which the film seemed to be implying.
Afterward we had a large class discussion, a very vocal one, about the issue. Everyone had an opinion to share.
Post
Okay so I’ve been lagging here. It’s just hard to post at 11pm when I get back home after class on Thursday because I have an early class Friday, then I forget to do it.
We watched a long movie about the pioneers of black journalism (politically incorrect term but you know what I mean)
It was very interesting (not joking) and informing, though I did know about 15% of the information already.
Race & Gender in the Media
Okay! So this blog is now being transformed magically into my class blog for JOUR 4250.
Last week’s class discussion was riveting – sort of. The video we watched was pretty biased. They made their point well, but it was also dated; from the mid 90’s. I think I could make a similar point about how we are racist to paper – we’re always buying the whitest kind. In any case. I forgot to blog, so this is my quick BS blog to fill it up! I’ll be more prompt in the future!
Adios! It’s my turn to carpool!
Final Project
The final project for this class was a group project, and my group decided to cover the story about fighting hunger in North Texas. Our focus was shaky at first but it was successfully narrowed down to a specific idea, and we finally found the human aspect. Please click the link below to view our final project:
Fighting Hunger in North Texas
The project was challanging but I believed we all learned a lot, especially about planning before shooting a video, video editing, and flash.
This class was my favorite of the semester and the one I felt like I learned the most in terms of usable skills for the future, as well as being a fun class, for me.
Any comments or feedback about the project are welcome.
Thanks, and have a great Christmas break!
Blog Assignment #2
Critique of The Halifax Explosion website: http://www.cbc.ca/halifaxexplosion
Overall this site makes good use of graphics, audio, video and photography. I think it suits its purpose, but I don’t think it is an exceptionally grand example of a superb multimedia website. For starters, it’s slow, or at least it was when I visitied it. I was able to get a quick glimpse of the tables and imgaes being tiny little red X’s before they actually loaded. Secondly, the site is vastly HTML only, I feel if it was a flash based website, not fully but at least moreso than it is now, it might feel easier to navigate. Many of the audio or video samples are in the form of a popup, which is sort of unnecessary and annoying. It could be flash, and then just come up in the same screen. One plus though, is that there is a text only version of the site, which I think is good because then it’s compatabile with software for blind people, which can read out the text to them. It’s also useful for mobile phones. Overall I’d say it is a good website but not exactly a prime example.
Critique of the Churchill Speeches website: http://www.churchillspeeches.com
This website is very original, very creative. It shows a time line full of photos and video, many quotes as well as a follow-along text of the speech’s words. It might be a little too content heavy though, as I was having some lag while playing it, it was taking up a lot of my computers’ resources. The content loaded quickly, though. It’s a good example of a multimedia website I think but, again, not a prime one. A mixture of flash and HTML/XML/JS/PHP would be good.
Defense of a good example of multimedia on the web:
Conjoined Twins: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/generated/realtime/conjoinedTwins.html
This is a story Angela Grant links on her website, and I believe it is a fine example of multimedia on the web. It has emotion, and it is an interesting subject: twins conjoined at the head, and the mother’s emotions of finding out, deciding to keep them, the day to day life and how it is different, some of the negativity she gets from other people, and her outlook on the future. All very compelling, and it made a great story. I personally think the use of video in this story was good, but much much less impressive than the still photos, which were spectacular. Many of the video shots were shaky, unnecessarily tight shots, etc. The photos were pristine in every way. The audio was great, no complaints there. But this could not have been a photo-only story, so the video played it’s well needed part.
First Audio Assignment
I interviewed my friend about his fanaticism with Nascar.
audio: Mike – Nascar
and the transcript: here.
Response to “Show me your camera”
this is a reply to Lisa’s recent post about some spot news she encountered, since I was unable to comment on the post.
What is it with people and driving into video places? I used to work at Blockbuster and a few months after I left, a car drove into it. My former manager gave me the security camera footage and I made a video with it, seen below. A few weeks later, a sister store in a neighboring town was also hit. Crazy!
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this blog was created for the purpose of using it in the class JOUR 4720 “Multimedia & The Web” at The University of North Texas in Fall 2008.
