Today’s Plan
- Interviews
- Kalman
- For next class
Interview Check In
Your two-camera interviews are due next Tuesday. Questions? Concerns? Anyone without a group?
Remember the criteria I am using to grade these projects:
- This project needs to be 55 seconds to 1 minute long
- This project needs a 6 second introduction that includes an opening shot outside of the interview location, a b-roll montage, a title, and some intro music that fades out. BONUS: Your title moves.
- This project needs to include text identifying participants
- This project needs one longer response that uses a J or L cut
Moving Objects in Adobe Premiere Using Keyframes
Today we are going to be following this simple tutorial for moving objects in Adobe Premiere. I’ve emailed out a photo of a kangaroo and a desert. After we finish the kangaroo and the desert, we’ll work with moving a title on and off the screen.
First, we need to make sure that video keyframes are visible on the timeline.
Make the bear run.
Make a title slide in.
Make a title fade out.
Make a title fade in.
Make a title scale in.
Kalman Project
I’m not sure how much time we have left today. I’m going to draft up a lecture here aiming to introduce our next project, what I affectionately call the Kalman project. I’ve written about this project, and it remains one of my favorite to teach. But I usually teach it embedded in a course on digital rhetoric: one in which we spend a semester analyzing how different communicative technologies (re)shape the ways humans conceive of themselves (subjectivity, what does it mean to be a self?), their world (ontology, what is reality?), knowledge (epistemology, what *is* the nature of knowledge), and the ways they relate to each other (ethics, or how we act–which is sometimes different then morality, or the study of how we think we *should* act). Rhetoric, as I teach it, concerns all of these things–it is an attempt to understand (analyze) and improve (actually do stuff) human communication and community. Rhetoric isn’t merely the study of persuasion in a direct sense, it is also the study of why we are resistant to change, why we shrink back at alterity/otherness, and how we can be better (to ourselves, our communities, our futures). There’s too much for me to say about this subject in one paragraph.
Apparatus theory is the name Gregory Ulmer gave to the study of how different technologies (re)shape us. Much of this work traces back to Walter Ong. I teach Ong in a lot of my other classes and have a stock lecture on him. Ong argues that “writing is a technology that restructures thought.” That’s the name of the very useful essay he wrote near the end of his career that attempts to sum up decades of reading and theorizing. It is a useful essay. Let’s examine it quickly.
In the essay, Ong traces out a few dozen effects that literacy has on human consciousness. Most of these things can be summarized as a few criteria:
- Literacy emphasizes the abstract. Words are divorced from reality. Words target elements of a holistically experienced reality and parcel them.
- Literacy individualizes. When I speak to you as a class, you are a group. When I ask you to read something on the screen, you become individuals. Writing is, most often, a solitary activity. Reading, after, say, 2nd grade, is almost entirely an individual activity (note that I increasingly think this is wrong and college classes should read challenging texts together because something viral and kinetic and awesome happens when you do. And you should totally read books out loud to the people you love). Side notes. Writing and reading are far more individualistic than speech.
- Literacy emphasizes logos. [Sigh, I hate talking about rhetoric as ethos, pathos, and logos, but here goes]
When I was writing my dissertation a decade ago, I was one of many scholars prompted by Ong’s work to think about how the Internet might change metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, etc. I was thinking particularly of Wikipedia, and argued that we would move away from singularity, autonomy, permanence,
and certainty and toward plurality, interactivity, transience, and risk/ambiguity. I like Marshal McLuhan and Gregory Ulmer and Elizabeth Eisenstein and others, was interested in how technology was reshaping the way we are–all those things I list above. If Ong is right, and literacy instigated such massive shifts in humans, then what would all this digital stuff do? At the time I was thinking about the Internet. This class we are going to think a bit about video.
My operating hypothesis is that video amplifies pathos (I’m stealing this from Marshall McLuhan, that video is more immediate than print; Ulmer has a whole thing on “flash reason,” putting the enthymeme in meme). In general use, the terms affect, emotion, and mood tend to be interchangeable. But in psychology–and by extension across the humanities–affect is different from emotion. Emotion is something that I know I feel. I can articulate it. I am consciously aware of it. For instance, I am sad.
Affect is different, however. It points to how “I” feel before I know how I feel. It is the feeling emanating through my body and influencing my consciousness. Affect affects how I exist in the world at a given time. This notion of affect I am developing resonates with Heidegger’s phenomenology–that our experience of our own being occurs within the bounds of a particular, but often inarticulable, mood.
In Rhetoric, studies of affect explore how places and spaces can subtly influence our moods. Thomas Rickert refers to this as attending to ambience: how space influences affect/feelings and thus structures or influences our experiences. One might be familiar with the derive of Situationalist International from the 1950’s and 1960’s. This semester I am interested in you exploring the subjective, affective experience of a place. The nature of this exploration can vary greatly depending on the place you explore. For instance, a few years ago I visited the African American museum in Atlanta, and it was clear that the place was designed to provoke an incredible affective and pathetic (unconscious and conscious) emotional experience. Other places might provoke a strong affective experience even thought they were not consciously designed to do so.
I don’t want you to rush and think about a place yet. First we need to read Kalman, because this project will be an attempt to translate her aesthetic into video. Her aesthetic is rather unique. Let’s listen.
For Next Class
For next class, I’d like you to read the chapters on January (“Inauguaration at last“) and April.
Our goal is, to quote the poet Robert Pinsky, “to read like a good chef eats.” That is: I will be asking you to “make me a Kalman that is not a Kalman.” To do this, you first must have a clear understanding of what a Kalman is. I will not tell you this. At least, I will not tell you this until you have told me what you think it is. I have a clear idea of what I think a Kalman is. But I won’t tell you. BUT this isn’t a shell game. I will not assess your work on whether you get MY idea of a Kalman right. I will assess your work on whether you present a notion of Kalman that resonates with her work. Can you defend your idea of a Kalman?
As professional writers, you will often be in a situation in which you have to create something. Sometimes this will be a readily available genre. Teaching you how to do that is not what this project is about.
Those of you who have taken ENG 201 with me know how many job ads call for creativity and independence. I have written several articles arguing that developing student creativity requires we put students in “disequilibriating” experiences; we have to “unschool” you. School is where I tell you what to do and how to do it, and then assess whether you can follow my directions. That is not what I think learning is. Rather, I think learning happens when I challenge you to do something and then give you feedback on how well you are negotiating all the elements of the challenge. Cicero once said: “the greatest impediment to those who want to learn is those who want to teach.”
You can do this.
To start doing this, read the Kalman and make a list of five ingredients you would need to make a Kalman. Think of a recipe. What do we need? What do we need to do? What is the equivalent of baking at 350 degrees?
