In this assignment you will bring many of the skills you have developed together to create a video collage. The video collage will feature an audio track, which will most likely be a piece of music but which also can contain your own recorded comments. While this audio track plays, you will sequence images and text to offer an interpretation of a literary work, to offer information about an author, genre, period, or other aspect of literary study, or to provide an overview of an issue of importance to the field of literary studies. Your collage should be at least three minutes in length.

There will be three major concerns related to this assignment:

1. Identifying a topic that lends itself to expression in a video collage. The key aspect of this form of composition is that it has a changing visual component--images. If you are working with photography and literature of the Great Depression, there would be little trouble coming up with materials that would lend themselves to this form of presentation. If you were doing Emily Dickinson, you might have more difficulty. One solution is to select a work that lends itself to visual exploration. Another solution is to broaden your definition of literature—if you want to interpret film, photography, fine art, or advertising you should be able to find ample materials for your project. A final solution is to work with a larger issues or aspect of literary studies. If you wanted to write about African-American fiction, war poetry, and so forth, you could find all kinds of images. Don’t be discouraged, but do think of an idea that will lend itself to this form.

2. Finding and making appropriate use of materials. You can use images that you collect online—be sure to keep track of their location as you collect them; you will include this information in the credits for your collage. For music, you will need to be a bit more aware. You may not simply insert a commercial piece of music into your collage. If you wish to use commercial music, then you will need to layer sections of 30 seconds or less into the overall composition. You can also use music that is released for use online; this will allow you to use an entire song. I suggest starting with the songs available on the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) but you can also find other public music sites where you can locate songs. If you have other non-commercial music sources, you can use them as well. Again, keep track of the information for the sources you use.

3. Composing the video collage. You will use the Movie Maker application to create the video collage. This program is based on a timeline composing process. You will import the audio and image clips—you can also import video—and then layer them in a sequence using the timeline. I will go over the process in class, but you will need to experiment to learn to work the program. The main skills you will need to emphasize are timing, sequencing, and integrating text into the collage.

Successful video collages will
• Demonstrate a thoughtful treatment of the topic. Again, you will want to ensure that the topic lends itself to visual representation. Viewers should finish the collage with a sense that it has spoken to them meaningfully about a literary work or issue.
• Appropriately use materials. We will be making our collages public, so we must respect intellectual property concerns. You need to use no more than 30 seconds of any copyright-protected song. You also need to list all of the sources you use in your credits.
• Smoothly integrate relevant images, sounds, and text. Begin with an idea for a video collage related to literature. Select images that convey ideas related to your topic. Work with the composing process to sequence and layer all of the elements together artfully.

As you work, you may want to look at some samples:

http://www.unc.edu/~fujita/fujitavc.wmv
http://www.unc.edu/~mclare/mclarenvc.wmv
http://www.unc.edu/~smithlj/smithvc.wmv