Variations on documentaries, literary or informational issue videos are well suited to the college classroom. Both formats generate a good deal of enthusiasm for familiar knowledge domain or rhetorical literacies.

Literary studies videos work well for explications of poems or discussions of an author, work, motif, genre, etc. Here are a few examples:

"A Blessing"

John Steinbeck

J. D. Salinger (rough draft)

Issue oriented videos lend themselves to both explorations of issues in specific disciplines or to research-oriented projects looking at local, national, and global concerns. Here are some examples:

Family Farm
Aids in Africa
Beauty
The Movement

You have several options when it comes to publishing your videos. Some of these will depend on the ways you've managed intellectual property concerns. If you are creating videos for a class and have used protected materials for academic purposes, you may want to post the videos to a protected class space to give students more leeway in creating their projects. If you are using your own materials, materials in the public domain, or if you have used protected materials fairly for critique or educational purposes, then you can publish them more widely. Here are some options:

For this workshop, you can upload your video directly to this blog follow this link and the fill out the form and submit your video as an attachment. Once you have submitted your video here, you may want to post it elsewhere for wider dissemination.

You can post videos on YouTube. You will need to sign up for an account. Once you have an account set up, go to the upload video link and follow the instructions. For discussion, you may want to look at the terms of service.

Similarly you can post videos at Google Video. Here are their terms of service.

Less commercial sites include Ourmedia and Creative Commons.

Most consumer level video editing programs are pretty simple to use. These tutorials can give you more ideas about some of the advanced features or get you started:

Atomic Learning's Moviemaker Tutorials, everything you need to learn to use the Moviemaker software

Microsoft's Moviemaker Tutorials, more resources for Moviemaker software

Atomic Learning's iMovie Tutorials, teaches you how to use the iMovie software

Apple's iMovie Tutorials, more instruction on iMovie

For this workshop you can select from three possible assignments. Feel free to use or adapt the assignments for your own classes.

Assignment One, A Literary Studies Video:

In this assignment you create a video slide show or collage. The video 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 video 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 audio, I suggest starting with the audio resources selected for this workshop but you can also find other public music sites where you can locate songs. For this workshop I have also placed several audio files of poetry that might be of use. Again, keep track of the information for the sources you use.

3. Composing the video collage. You will use the iMovie 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, 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 videos 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. Any materials must be integral to the message you hope to deliver. 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.

Option Two, An Informational Issue Video:

In this assignment you will create a video collage that addresses an issue of national or local importance. 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 deliver a message about your issue. Your collage should be at least two minutes in length.

There will be three major concerns related to this assignment:

1. Identifying a topic and developing a message. Ideas for topics should not be too hard to discover—immigration, education, violence, gender relations, commercialization, environment, politics, and similar themes should lead you to an issue. You will then need a plan—for instance contrasting images of well-funded vs. poorly funded schools over a soundtrack with selected statistics shown as text could easily convey a message about education. You will need to select a topic that matters to you and which will allow you to locate relevant images online. You may also want to conduct research in order to better understand the topic and compose text to be layered into the collage.

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 audio, I suggest starting with the resources selected for this workshop but you can also find other public music sites where you can locate songs. For this workshop I have also placed several audio files of poetry that might be of use. Again, keep track of the information for the sources you use.

3. Composing the video collage. You will use the iMovie 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, 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 may want to conduct some research and ensure that the text you integrate into the collage provides compelling information. Viewers should finish the collage with a sense that it has spoken to them meaningfully about the issue at hand.

• Appropriately use materials. We will be making our collages public, so we must respect intellectual property concerns. Any materials must be integral to the message you hope to deliver. 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 message you wish to present. Select images that convey ideas related to your topic. Learn about the issue and decide what points need to be made through text. Work with the composing process to sequence and layer all of the elements together artfully.

Alternative Assignment, A Mashup

Your assignment is to create a video mashup that offers commentary on an aspect of culture. There are two possibilities for creating the mashup. One you can take an existing video, and then add new audio to change its meaning. Or you can take a piece of audio--e.g., a song or speech with a clear message--and then add images that deliver your commentary.

The key strategy you will use to generate your message is juxtaposition. If the audio you use is promoting a concept like equality, you'll want to layer images over the audio that analyze this concept and help viewers see it in a new light--images of poverty that question the premises behind the concept will create a juxtaposition that delivers the mashup message.

You can learn more about mashups by reading this article by the Washington Post. You can see some examples of film mashups at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-cut_trailers.

You should also strive to be entertaining in the mashup. Humor, engaging images and sounds, and transitions and cuts will keep the mashup engaging.

Before you create the mashup, you will need to find raw materials

Political mashups are good candidates for this assignment, and you can download some news raw materials made available by the Washington Post.

You can also re-use some of the film mashups above and find many film trailers at the IMDB or the Apple trailer site.

I would also encourage you to try to find alternative forms to use for your mashup. There are resources selected for this workshop. You can also find lots of video footage of current events on news Web sites. You can also use historical videos. Start with the Internet Archive, and particularly with the Praelinger collection. You can also look on YouTube, iFilm, and other Internet video sites, but you may want to try videos with some seriousness to begin with.

To compose the mashup you will use the iMovie application. You will need to import the video into the film editing program, and then edit the clip and add the audio to create your message. The movie editing programs are easy to use, but I will give a demonstration and help you.

If the video is in AVI or QuickTime format you should have little trouble. There are many video clips online that cannot be directly imported into the programs. For Youtube videos you can use Vixy.net, a conversion and download tool for YouTube videos. For other videos I may be able to help you screen capture them for your use. Sometimes you will just not be able to get the files you want, but in most cases you can with some flexibility and ingenuity.

The links here lead to large collections of images or videos you can use for your projects. You can always find more resources and look for specific items by conducting Web searches.

Apple Movie Trailer Collections
The Internet Archive's video collection

When you find a link to a QuickTime video on the Web, downloading and using the file is a simple affair. Unfortunately as often the case is more complicated. Windows media files, embedded QuickTime files, and Flash video files are harder to download and may not be imported into iMovie. In these cases, you may have some luck using some of the tools listed below:

Vixy.net A conversion and download tool for YouTube videos

iShowU Inexpensive screen capture software for mac

Download Embedded A Firefox plug in for downloading embedded objects from a Web page--useful for downloading QuickTime files.

Flip4Mac Allows Windows Media Files to be played with QuickTime

Since downloading the video files--especially embedded and flash videos (like those on YouTube or Google) can be tricky, the low-level path to working with moving images is through still images. You can refer to the resources below to get started:

Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Reading Room
The Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Catalog
Flickr
Photobucket
Wikipedia's public domain photograph resources

You're also going to want to use sound in your video. You can record your voice using a microphone to create voiceovers. You may also want to use recorded audio files. Here are some resources to get you started:

Audio from the Internet Public Library
Audio from the American Memory Project
Frogstar's sound effects, cartoons and audio resources
CCmixter's music samples and their Freesound project
Podsafe Audio

Remix videos, often called mashups participate in an information literacy that features lots of decision making about intellectual property and the fair use of materials. Initially, these videos were constructed around juxtapositions used to create humor or satire. Early examples like

Shining

Demonstrate the basic premise of composing a remix video. The trailer for the movie The Shining has been remixed with an alternative soundtrack and voiceover. The resulting happy spin applied to the scary film is funny and in some ways insightful about how our expectations of genre and the influences of things like music in shaping a video message.

Bushwhacked takes the existing audio track from a State of the Union address and remixes it to change the message. By manipulating the audio track and layering it over the video track from the speech, the video offers clever political critique.

As the genre has evolved, the term remix has become more aligned with recutting an existing video and the humor and satire have become something of sub-genres. The Web site Jumpcutis built around the premise that users can remix the videos of others to create new combinations. Web sites like Photobucket have similar features. Remix videos, then, are staples of user-created political and cultural critique as well as examples of changing models of ownership and authorship represented by online video.

For more information, you can explore some of the following sources and examples:

Movie Trailer Remixes

iFilm
The Trailer Mash
Wikipedia