Hello!
This is my first post here, so let me explain why I joined this group.
For over four years I have been teaching a college level course where
students from the US exchange short videos with students at universities in
other countries. In 2001-02 we worked with Russian students in Moscow, in
2002-03 and 2003-04 we worked with Belarusan students in Minsk and this
year we are doing a three way exchange with students in Istanbul,Turkey and
Mexico City. I teach at SUNY/Purchase in both the Film and New Media
Programs and my class is also open to other students - if they can talk
their way in. 8)
The course runs for a full year and involves a lot of background reading on
the cultures with whom we work and a lot of exploration of surrealist
production techniques like the exquisite corpse, because we use these
methods in the class. In fact the main production model we use is one where
students first write paragraphs that form stories, than design images that
make up mini-graphic novels and finally shoot and edit video scenes that
build into longer video pieces. These are developed by being passed back
and forth over the Internet amongst small student teams, as the students
try to create audio-visual meanings across cultures. If you would like to
see some of this work it is visible here:
http://rachel.ns.purchase.edu/~jrubin/
What we are doing is not exactly videoblogging, but it is very related. The
students all shoot MiniDV and in the past we have used DivX to compress the
five minute videos down to 40 - 80MB full-frame videos and then we have
sent them to each other by FTP. Posting them online was NOT part of the
process. However, after the project was done we used FlixPro to convert
them to much smaller Flash files which are what you see on the web site.
I am posting here both because I thought that some videobloggers might find
this project interesting, but also because I am considering moving to a
videoblog format this year and figured that I might get some good advice
from participants in this group. I guess the main thing preventing me from
going the videoblog route so far is that I want video quality that is good
enough to work when projected in a small theatre. I was amazed at how good
the DivX files looked projected in front of 100 people, but once these
files were whacked down to 320 x 240 they just were not acceptable. I am
looking into the new Flash video format in hopes that this could be done in
one step - but I'm not sure the technology is there yet.
I also have some questions about videoblog formats, since what I need would
be a multi-threaded, team videoblog, where many students could post to the
same blog - but I have taken up a lot of space already, so I will close
here. I hope some of you will find the project of interest. I hope to
expand it to other venues in the future.
Jon Rubin
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