Insomnia Film Festival 2007

So, two weekends ago, I met four of my senior art students to discuss the next 24 hours over Saturday's breakfast... We were preparing to create an entry for Apple's Insomnia Film Festival, and hoping to win Macbook Pros and Final Cut software.

...24 hours later, we had a 3 minute film and a lot more knowledge of Final Cut and the do's and don'ts of short films.

What follows is a copy of the film, which you can rate on apple's website for the festival until November 9th.

http://edcommunity.apple.com/insomnia_fall07/contest.php

Web based curriculum

For anyone that is interested, I wanted to put a link to a blog that I started for a previous class. The blog is mostly reflections about using internet based curriculum. I realize that is of a slightly different vein from v-casting, but may be of interest to some...

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/wond0013/wonpet/

Also, I created a website that goes through the projects that I did with my class and has more links...

http://wonpet.googlepages.com

Rocketing along...

So, in looking for video blogs that I would read on a regular basis, I have had mixed results. Rocketboom is a satirical news daily that is entertaining and mildly informative. It reminds me of a high school teacher's "News of the Weird" portion of current events. I like the accent of the anchor, Joanne, and I like the option to click into links that tell more about the stories that are zipping past. My browser opens the link in a new tab, allowing me to continue hearing the audio portion of the newscast, while potentially getting more in depth information on a topic that strikes my fancy.



Another vlog I found that I'd like to go back to is called Chasing Windmills. I added this to my subscription list and then I realized that this is no longer being published as of like 8 months ago. This was a common problem. I would look for vlogs logged in directories and they would be interesting, but after subscribing I would realize that they weren't active anymore. A second problem being when the links no longer have video files in them, so that you can't even go back and watch the old posts. Anyway, Chasing Windmills was sort of an artsy weekly drama, filmed by people that appeared to know what they were doing, and including characters that reappeared and developed over time. Another point of interest, was that the locale was the Minneapolis area, so many familiar places show up like the Walker Art Center, etc. Also notable is that the creators of Chasing Windmills used Blogger as their platform.

The audience for both series is probably a 20 to 30 something age group, likely urban in either location or background. The Chasing Windmills group used classic cinema technique, whereas the Rocketboom posts were a combination of traditional news clips of anchor slash news, with addition of sound effects, humor, and a much quicker rate of frame changeover.