Student Originated Studies: Media

Hello everyone.

Just to let you all know, the Spring Syllabus has been posted in draft form on the Drupal site. Consider this document to be fluid, and check back often for updates. Julia has said that she will provide a more complete syllabus by our first meeting (mirrored on the Drupal site of course).

Most of our meeting times this upcoming quarter will be in COM 326 on Tuesdays, from 10am to 5pm. These times may vary somewhat within these hours, depending on the week. Note that on Week 9 we DO NOT meet Tuesday but instead have individual
conferences Weds-Thurs (locations TBA).

Also, as it stands now, our final screening is likely going to be Wed. or Thurs. of Evaluation week, rather than Week 10 as was previously mentioned.

Attached there are some jpeg photographs inside of a zip file taken by John Huey of the "Bunny Procreation Party" installation that SOS Media did during Fall Quarter. 

The Winter Syllabus has been updated with Work In Progress Critique schedules, individual conference schedules, and Tea/Breakfast and Icebreaker activity responsibilities. Refer to it for your place in the schema of things.

You can now view most recent posts in the Recent Posts link in the sidebar.
The Contact link now has contact information for all members of SOS Media.

In the Production Calendar link in the sidebar, there is a new page where you can post dates of shoots, and have them displayed in a calendar format. This is very clunky, but is functional and might be useful for people wanting assistance with their productions. You might be better off using a service like Google Calendar and then linking to that in a "student work" post. However, here is how to operate the drupal calendar.

To create a new post on the calendar, you must Create Content (sidebar under your username), and choose the "event" type.
Then enter a title for your event. This is what will show up in the post on the calendar, so you should probably identify it with your name or the name of your project.
You can then choose a category (your name, or Ctrl-click for multiple names, if a multi-person production) for it to be listed under.
You can then enter more information about your event, which will be shown when someone clicks on your event in the calendar view.

When viewing the calendar, you can filter the events by student-name category, in order to display events from only one person. By default, the calendar shows events in all categories.

For now, please refrain from changing your username and password. Since login to the Drupal page happens through Evergreen's Central Authentication Service, it will alter nothing, and only mess things up. If you want to change your password, change your Evergreen password. Your username can only be what your Evergreen username is. Perhaps this will be fixed soon.

The Winter Syllabus has been posted in skeleton form. Continue to refer back to it as the quarter progresses, and continuous updates are assuredly applied to it.

What do you think about the visual appeal of the Drupal site? Is it frumpy? Does this negatively impact your ability to work positively with Drupal? These are important questions. You all should go to the forum topic to discuss this issue of the moment, and to see alternative Drupal themes that could be implemented in a matter of moments.

~Jed 

Hello Everyone.
I have been doing some work on the Drupal site to make it a bit more intuitive and useful. Here is a summation of what has been changed for the better.

• The contact page now has both Ruth and my own email address in spam-safe image format.
• The Student Projects section has been revised. Now instead of there being a long list of forum containers for each person's project, we are using the "categories" ability of drupal. Essentially, this lets you create new content of pretty much any type, and tag it with your name, and your post will be listed under your name in the "Student Work" section on the right-hand menu of the drupal site. This will allow a lot more freedom and intuitive organization, I think. (Continued . . . )
  

I am attempting to arrange a 16mm film screening of La Jetée, directed and written by Chris Marker, and also The Holy Mountain, directed and written by Alejandro Jodorowsky. This screening would occur on Wednesday night of Week 7 (11-08) at approximately 6:10pm. One of the aspects of Mediaworks that I really miss in SOS: Media are the film screenings. It seemed like they were a great chance for students to watch a notable, academically interesting work of media together, and spend valuable and intellectually stimulating time exchanging ideas about it. This marks attempt number one at reclaiming something resembling that in the SOS: Media class, at least among some portion of peers interested in achieving something approximating the same sort of intensity and energy that Mediaworks had. I will be bringing handouts on both films containing some contextual information to approach viewing them, as well as background and other notable information on each director. (continued...)

Here is a link to a 15.6MiB MOV encode of everyone's animation from week one. The optimal method of acquiring this h.264 encoded video would likely be to save it to your hard drive and then play it with either the VLC Media Player or Quicktime. If your browser plugin is particularly stalwart, you might try opening it in a new tab/page and streaming it also.

Please post comments if this doesn't work for you, and I will try to help you!

1. Login using your Evergreen login and password
2. Subscribe to the SOS Media Group

Cheers to Jed, our new SOS Media program aide!