ACTIVITY IDEAS

To learn any skill, you need to repeatedly practice it, and also to get feedback that helps you know if your practice is hitting the mark (whether from an instructor or from your own assessment of your work--i.e. seeing whether the ball goes in the hoop as you practice your free throws).

The challenge of learning media skills is that it just takes loads and loads of time to complete a media project of any meaningful scope or depth or complexity. The following activities are designed to target extremely specific elements of media-rich storytelling, and to do so with extremely quick activities that tighten up the feedback loop.

ONE SELFIE TRACKING SHOT FROM INSIDE TO OUTSIDE

In this activity, participants practice a moving shot, giving a 30-60 second response to an interview question or prompt while walking from their computer outside and then back to their computer.

• start all together in zoom
• get ready to record yourself in selfie mode, making sure that your phone is visible in the zoom shot
• in as synchronized a fashion as possible, everyone hit record, and start walking outside as you begin answering the question
• walk all the way "outside" (this can just be outside your room if getting all the way "outside" is impossible), then turn around and walk all the way back in
• wait until we're all back in Zoom, then hit stop
• share your video on Slack

For the following week, someone (either the students, if it's important for them to learn, or the instructor, if not) synchronizes the video and edits together either a tiled, synchronized version of all the videos, or a montage that intercuts them to produce interesting narrative effects.

STORY OF YOUR SPACE IN THREE OBJECTS

In this activity, participants practice creating meaningful "insert" shots or "b-roll" that can help tell the story of an interview subject.

• look around your space and identify three objects that say something important about who you are and where you are
• take close-ups of each object with extremely slow and extremely smooth camera movement

WHO ARE THEY AND WHAT ARE THEY DOING? (VIDEO ONLY, AUDIO ONLY)

In this activity, students focus on telling the story of a person, their environment, and their activity, but with a catch: you only get to use audio OR video, but not both.

• half of the class is assigned video-only: in as many shots as you can capture in 5 minutes, you need to capture the activity of someone they have access to (a friend or family member or pet they are allowed to be close to). We need to know who this person is, where they are, and what they're doing.
• half of the class is assigned audio-only, and while you are allowed to ask the person a question or two that "tells" us about them, you need to do your best to acquire sounds that SHOW us where they are and what they're doing.