FINAL SHORT: PERSUASION
The task here is to make a short motion picture that celebrates a person, place or thing. The goal is for students to use everything they have learned about sound, picture, editing, narrative and rhetoric to make audiences care about their respective subjects.
Four critically important restrictions:
A warning: irony is a powerful device, but it can also be a trap. The story of “my roommate the superhero” or the commercial for the wonders of heroin might elicit a chuckle or two, but unless such projects are extraordinarily well done, they are very unlikely to move audiences.
The finished product should be two to four minutes long. As always, students will output the completed project as a QuickTime movie and then upload it to their websites.
Four critically important restrictions:
- No dialog: Students are encouraged to explore opportunities for closely matching up picture and sound, but visual and audio elements should be recorded independently and there must be no dialog.
- No “music video montages”: The project must consist of more than just picture edited to a piece of music. Montages of this sort can be very effective, but from both a technical and rhetorical standpoint, they are too easy.
- Don’t rely on visual effects to make a point: This project is meant to challenge students to show what they can do with just cameras and their imaginations. Too often, visual effects (slow motion, reverse motion, split screen, superimposition, etc.) are a cop-out, a way of avoiding the hard work of conveying ideas and eliciting responses through composition, editing and performance.
- The visual images should not simply mirror what we are hearing in the soundtrack. Make sure the sound is contributing something above and beyond what the picture is providing, and vice-versa.
A warning: irony is a powerful device, but it can also be a trap. The story of “my roommate the superhero” or the commercial for the wonders of heroin might elicit a chuckle or two, but unless such projects are extraordinarily well done, they are very unlikely to move audiences.
The finished product should be two to four minutes long. As always, students will output the completed project as a QuickTime movie and then upload it to their websites.