Here's some exerpts from the project proposal for this Portable Video research/production - sort of a "why are we here?" type reading.
This dramatic contemporary shift to internet-based media distribution makes video portable. Devices like mobile phones and portable media players make it possible to have our media follow us wherever we’d like. But as the devices change, does the content change with it? What does it mean to view media outside the home or office, and how do we as content producers prepare for this new medium? The historic USC School of Cinema-Television is a fantastic place to launch a coordinated assessment of this new small screen medium.
Over the course of the 2005-2006 academic year, visiting expert Kenyatta Cheese and USC graduate student Justin Hall will draw upon colleagues from the Film School, the Annenberg Center for Communication, and the Interactive Media Division, as well as outside experts, to create a series of workshops and a class to explore this new frame around the images we make, watch, and share.
Summary Curriculum
Participants will learn about new forms of video content, short form and small screen. Also, they will learn practical skills for preparing digital video files, and explore means of online distribution. USC community members can potentially contribute to these rapidly evolving fields through their work with personal videoblogs or more collaborative online video content.
Both the workshop and the 499 class will cover these subject matter; students there will have a chance to develop deeper collaborative work, and also explore the antecedents and theoretical underpinnings of this small media revolution.
Workshops (Fall 2005)
For four hours, once a month, USC community members can bring in videotapes, cameras, digital media files, and we will work together to digitize them and prepare them for internet distribution to portable media devices. Participants will be encouraged to bring in their portable video playback devices for screenings of short-form videos. We will host group discussion of the best kinds of expression for the small screen. And we will work in concert with other videoblogging services and new media initiatives outside of the local community, to provide USC-generated work to broad based group projects online.
Class (Spring 2006)
During the Spring of 2005, Cheese and Hall will lead a "Portable Video" 499 elective class within the Interactive Media Division. Students will explore the aesthetic and social impacts of small, short videos viewed over pocket players.
The skill-based curriculum is covered through practical work with digital cameras, video editing, compression and online distribution technologies. In weekly discussions, we will address portable video in the context of a number of important areas in technology culture research: blogging and video blogging, file sharing and p2p, intellectual property and the digital commons, citizen journalism, collaborative virtual communities and the impact of networks on media forms and social life.
In weekly 1-5 minute assignment video shorts, students will be asked to engage these issues and practice the skills they're learning in class, and thereby express their own vision for this new medium.
Outside Speakers
Both the workshop and the class will have a number of visiting speakers to draw upon for lectures, demos and mini-workshops.
Biographies
Kenyatta Cheese develops systems and practices for participatory media production and distribution. His projects and ideas have been implemented by a diverse group of content developers including Paper Tiger TV, SonyBMG, ABC News, and the videoblog Rocketboom. Currently he works with the Eyebeam Atelier Center for Art and Technology in New York City and edits the daily blog on decentralized and participatory media, unmediated.org.
Justin Hall is a graduate student in Interactive Media at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. Prior to his studies, Hall worked as a freelance journalist, covering video games and mobile phones from Japan and Northern California for a wide variety of print and online publications. His web site, Justin's Links, started in January 1994, is an early, sustained exploration of the potential for personal publishing on the world wide web. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine referred to him as “the founding father of personal blogging.” Hall received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Swarthmore College and has studied extensively under the writer Howard Rheingold.