looking back

Making this movie was an interesting way of connecting what we've learned in class to film and writing. The first thing that comes to mind is that film making is a technology that has been evolved from writing. This can be connected to an earlier reading assignment. Baron's idea is that literacy evolves. From stone tablets to paper to movies. I learned from making our film that movies are just words put on tape. Thus, in a way when we make films we are writing. It does not seem like it but thats because writing is changing to fit into the modern world. Writing's main goals are to spread knowledge and words. But now instead of doing this by paper and pen we are "writing" on film.
I also think that this assignment helped connect the ideas of writing and technology. In a previous assignment we had to make our own writing tools to prove writing is a technology. This was part of Ong's article on writing as a technology. This new assignment did the exact same thing. We wrote using a different tool than normal. As technology becomes more advanced we can think of new ways in which to write.
The thing about our film is that we actually did do a lot of writing. When I think of film the first thing that doesn't come to mind is writng. But during the movie making process over half our time was spent writing. The first thing we did was write our script. This helped us figure out what to say and what to put in our movie. It occured to me that writing is very important to films because if there weren't scripts movies would probably never be made. Then in the filming we wrote. Since we didn't want to just have a person talking we needed to show some action. Thus we decided to film one of our characters writing the examples we chose to include. Even while making a movie writing was always on our mind. We couldn't make the movie withour some, in our case a lot, of writing.

youtube

So far I like the project we are doing involving youtube. But then again we haven't actually posted our videos on youtube. I guess I'll have to see the final results in order to see if youtube was good or not for this project. This is because I have not yet dealt with the issues presented by Alexandra Juhasz's essay. Her issuaes deal with the backlash of youtube for the classroom. I'm sure the issue about uninformed people coommenting on the videos will come up but I don't know how I'll feel about it yet.

I have seen connections with writing and video in my project. To start with my group had to organize a script that went the movie. This is where writing comes in to movie making. Since we are not seasoned actors it would be hard to just ne on screen and adlib. The main idea for our video involves writing. I'm not just talking about how we have to talk about writing either. My group plans to write out examples and video tape them. In ways like this I see the connection between film and writing.

On the other hand this is an assignment, so a lot of planning and work goes into it. I find it more difficult to see the connection between writing and low budget films found on youtube. I find this to be true because youtube is the kind of program that I view as just being there for fun. While writing components are in there, writing does not seem that involved as the project we are doing.

Peer Review 3

I thought this peer review went better than before. I felt that this time I got better advice on my essay and clear ways in how to improve my essay. The negative is that even though we were assigned groups at this point only one person has edited my paper. So while that person gave excellant advice I would have like more variety.I also felt more comfortable editing papers. I knew what to look for in editing and when to give advice. Through the other two reviews I was finally able to get a sense of what my fellow students wanted from their editors. Of course editing may be easier because I felt that people's papers were more thought out this tome around. A fact I believe relates to the fact that students now know what is expected to be in their essays.
When looking at my past review blogs I notice some changes but also things that haven't changed. The most obvious for me is that in all my essays I didn't feel like I got as much editors as i would have liked. The first time around we had small groups so I only had one, maybe two editors. During the second project I only had one editor until I pleaded with the class to review my paper. This was weird for me considering I felt this review had the best chances for getting a lot of reviewers. I don't know if I'm not giving my reviewers enough time to edit before I check my essay or if they are simply not reviewing my paper. Perhaps in future there should be more monitering on these review sessions.
But as I said there has also been changes which I believe have been for the better. In the first review I was just getting used to editing papers and people were just doing the same with my paper. Therefore I thought it was harder to know when and how to give advice. I also thought the advice on my paper was not so great. But with each peer review I noticed I get better at the editing process. This is also true about the advice given to my papers.
For the most part, the blogs that I looked at would agree with me on the positive changes of the peer reviews. The idea of not enough editors was mixed among the students. For some it was a problem just like me and others must have been fine because they didn't mention it.

Reading and writing about comics, part 2

For this blog assignment I looked at Chase's part one blog entry here. Here he talks about a comic located at http://funnyninjas.wordpress.com/. Using Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, I felt that he did an excellant job talking about one aspect of the comic. He made me think about the icons being used that I had not thought about before. He showed me the relationship between what the book explained and the comic showed. However, he did only talk about one aspect so I want to mention some other thing I saw in this comic.
The first thing I want to discuss is time in the comic. This pertains to chapter four in McCloud's book. Here McCloud attempts to explain how time works within panels. McCloud explains that though there may be a lot of things going on at seemlingly the same moment time is moving forward. I got this point in Chase's chosen comic. Here the characters are speaking through bubbles. While it looks like they are speaking at the same time you can get a sense of order. By looking at what each ninja is saying you can tell what is being said first and which one is the reply. Of course as McCloud mentions the fact that people in America read left to right helps us in this observation. The ninja on the left side usually begins each panel with a sentence and the right sided ninja replies. Even when this does not happen it is easy to tell what happens first.