Sleep No More

Tribeca Films Storyscapes Festival was last April.  Tribeca Films, and other traditional film organizations such as the IFP and Sundance Films are moving towards supporting transmedia project.

The clip above is from the Storyscapes Festival.  Ingrid Kopp from Tribeca describes the projects as:

Insomniacs are both spectators and actors in this large, interactive project that combines accounts of sleepless nights from across the world. In many countries, at any time, at least one in three people have problems sleeping. New Yorkers are no strangers to this affliction, familiar with the anxiety and pressures that keep us up at night. The talented team at NFB Interactive have been collecting stories via video, text and drawing online since fall 2012, and in this second phase of the project, they will share answers to questions like, what is your relationship with your alarm clock? What is out of your control? What scares you?  In the Storyscapes space, A Journal of Insomnia will take you into a different zone. Share your own stories of sleepless nights and discover what other people get up to in the wee hours by entering a bedroom space in this fully immersive, contemplative installation. 

Here are some other examples from PC Magazine 

The NY Times on April 12th, 2013 pulbished an article:  As You Watch. Invasion of Platforms 
Visitors to “A Journal of Insomnia,” part of the Storyscapes section of the forthcoming Tribeca Film Festival, will set up an appointment and, at the agreed-upon hour, receive a phone call. They will then presumably stumble sleepless to their computers, click on the “Insomnia” Web site and interact with one of four characters featured in the festival’s foray into transmedia: the crazy-quilt crossroads of new technology, uncertain expectations and audience participation.

Here are some transmedia examples from the festival:


Robots in Residence - While films are premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, some of the tiniest attendees are making their own movie. The BlabDroids are small cardboard-bodied robots with the voice of a 7-year-old. Their disarming nature lures people into answering their 17 questions, including "Who do you love most in the world?" and "What is the worst thing you have ever done to someone?" The BlabDroids were Alex Reben's thesis at MIT, part of which concerned theELIZA effect. Reben said each of the BlabDroids costs about $800 and three days to build. After interviewing Tribeca Film Festival attendees, the BlabDroids will make their own documentary and screen it on April 21st.

This Exquisite Forest - Games played by surrealists were never of the board or boring variety. They would instead assemble word or picture collages from their collective imaginations in the game known as Exquisite Corpse. Music video director and photographer Chris Milk and digital media artist Aaron Koblin have made a globe-spanning digital version of the game re-named with This Exquisite Forest. The collaborative art project features artists from the Tate Modern including Bill Woodrow, Mark Titchner, and Dryden Goodwin, who planted the seeds of the forest and worked with Google in growing the forest online. It's built using HTML5, JavaScript, and the Google App Engine and uses Google Cloud storage.

Star Wars Uncut - Plenty of Star Wars fans dress up as favorite characters when they go see the movies, but Star Wars Uncut gives them a chance to be in the movies. The project is the work of web developer Casey Pugh, who diced up The Empire Strikes Back into 480 segments of 15 seconds each and asked fans to remake them in whichever way they chose. So far they've featured everything from Han Solo getting frozen in the style of A-HA's "Take On Me" video to Claymation Boba Fett. All the segments are on view in the Storyscapes installation, and the final product will be released as a director's cut, as was Pugh's earlier work A New Hope Uncut.

A Journal of Insomnia - In a black box with a low-ceilinged entrance a computer glows red. Visitors enter the structure to pass into the world of the insomniac, donning headphones and answering on-screen questions about their relationship to sleep. The installation's creators said that rather than taking a clinical approach to the widespread condition of insomnia, they took a personal, anthropological one. Visitors to the site can watch insomniacs tell their stories and make an (after-dark) appointment to be woken up and experience firsthand struggles with sleep. A Journal of Insomnia is the work of the National Film Board of Canada.

Sandy Storyline is a video chronicle of Hurricane Sandy's effects. On the project site, those affected by the storm can share written, audio, video, or photographic accounts. The installation is set inside high walls, with a television askew on a pile of debris playing documentary footage. One great irony of Sandy Storyline is that you can charge your mobile device in the installation, something so many were scrambling to do for weeks after the storm.

Artist Statement Question Bridge

Question Bridge Kickstarter

Here is the Artist Statement for Question Bridge:

This is a critical period in history for the Black community. In recent years, many have been able to transcend racial, cultural and economic boundaries while others have found themselves increasingly confined to the margins of society. Black men are particularly challenged by this paradox. Although a black man is the President of the United States, black men are still severely overrepresented in incarceration and high school dropout rates, and suffer disproportionately from various preventable health risks and as victims of homicide.  Empirical data shows Americans, including Black people, still harbor negative associations with Black males that directly impact their ability to function successfully in this country. Of particular concern are statistics which demonstrate that the over-representation of Black males in the penal system and the disciplinary processes in schools does not correlate to their behavior. In reality, Black males are not more violent, more criminal, or more disruptive than their White male peers. The good news is that a meta-analysis of the social science research shows that there are effective means of overcoming our negative bias about Black males. One of which, is being exposed to more complex, multi-faceted, and whole images and narratives of black males. This is what the Question Bridge project hopes to accomplish.  “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” - W.E.B. Dubois  Question Bridge: Black Males opens a window onto the complex and often unspoken dialogue among Black men, creating an intimate and essentially genuine experience for viewers and subjects, while providing new opportunities for understanding and healing. This project brings the full spectrum of what it means to be “black” and “male” in America to the forefront. “Blackness” ceases to be a simple, monochromatic concept.  By creating an identity container (e.g. “Black” and “Male”), then creating a way of releasing the diversity of identities and thought within that container, we can break the container. Question Bridge strives to make it more difficult to say, “Black Males are___.” 

If we succeed in deconstructing stereotypes about arguably the most opaque and feared demographic in America, then the Question Bridge model can work to overcome limiting assumptions about any demographic.

“Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.” - W.E.B. DuBois

Here are other examples of art statements:

Art Study Org 

Digital Photography School


Main Goal of Writing an Artist Statement is discussing your understanding of your process, ideas, and field. The statement also gives you an opportunity to define the critical conversation you want to engage through your art.  Consider asking yourself these questions:

• What am I doing?
• How am I doing it?
• Why am I doing it?
• What influences me most?
• How does my art relate to the art of my contemporaries?
• What do I want other people to understand about my art?
• Am I unwilling to discuss any aspects of my work? If so, why?

Examples:


“When I made the piece Red Goya, a diptych where two prints from the same negative are juxtaposed in 40×30 and 24×20 formats, I wanted to force an engagement with the question of the viewer’s taste, to examine the power of the physical manifestation of the image to alter its impression on a person. Does the bigger print have more authority because of its relationship to a body viewing it in a space, as something you can’t take in with one glance? Something that envelops you? Or is the smaller print more powerful with its higher resolution? More jewel-like in its intensity of color? More precious in its scale?” –Eileen Quinlan

“My new work deals with emptying my body: ‘Boat emptying, stream entering.’ This means that you have to empty the body/boat to the point where you can really be connected with the fields of energy around you. I think that men and women in our Western culture are completely disconnected from that energy, and in my new work I want to make this connection possible.” –Marina Abramovic

“I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women—underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves. In one way or another, my work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition.” –Carrie Mae Weems
Meaning

I think it would be disastrous if you could say what the message of Hamlet was . . . . everyone is going to come away with something different depending on if they've just left their lovers or if they've just had a child or if they've just been fired.
- Beth Henley

I don't tell people what things mean, but I describe the way they occur, in order to stir people's curiosity.
-Barabara Bloom

Filmmaker and Mediastorm Mentor Visit: Suha Araj

I Am Palestine from Suha Araj - Filmmaker on Vimeo.

Artist and filmmaker Suha Araj is often found overhearing, watching, or telling a story. Her work often explores the displacement of immigrant communities and her passion lies in bridging cultures. Her short film, I am Palestine screened at festivals internationally and is used as an educational tool. She served as a story advisor to the Sundance selection, Slingshot HipHop and produced the narrative short, Fruition. Installation art (Displacement, Inshallah Falasteen, Buried in Michigan) and acting (Chocolate in Heat, Suitcase) have inspired her storytelling in new mediums. Her latest feature script, Khsara explores the humor created from the contrast of cultural expectations. Khsara has been developed with RAWI and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, Torino Film Lab, Dubai Film Connection, EAVE, and IFP No Borders 2011. Khsara was also selected for the inaugural Emerging Visionaries program from IFP, the Lincoln Center and the Royal Bank of Canada. This February participated in the Berlinale Talent market and Talent Campus.

For seven years Suha was part of the film selection committee of the Arab Film Festival in San Francisco and has also served on the LunaFest Board of Advisors. She is a cofounder of DivineCaroline.com, a publishing platform for women to tell their stories.  She also teaches for Tribeca Films.  Her last work was a short film called The Cup Reader.  The film is about:

The Warde, shamed as a young girl yet renowned in Palestine for her mystical seeing and matchmaking, lives with her sister Jaleleh and reads the fortunes of her clients. Each visitor must make a choice between love and marriage, not having the luxury of both.

The Cup Reader Trailer from Suha Araj - Filmmaker on Vimeo.

PechaKucha Presentation

Pecha Kucha Chicago: Repetition and Variation (Live) from Felix Jung on Vimeo.

PechaKucha is a simple 20x20 presentation where the presented shows 20 images for 20 seconds and the images advance automitically as the presented talks along the images.  PechaKucha or Pecha Kucha (Japanese ペチャクチャ) follows a format, which keeps presentations concise and fast-paced, powers multiple-speaker events called PechaKucha Nights (PKNs).  PKN's were designed in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Tokyo's Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa), as a way to attract people to SuperDeluxe, their experimental event space in Roppongi, and to allow young designers to meet, show their work, and exchange ideas.  In 2004, a few cities in Europe began holding PKNs, the first of several hundred cities that have since launched similar events around the world.  As of June 2012, PechaKucha Nights were held in 534 cities worldwide.

You will be creating a PK presentation to describe your song that will need to be presented to the class as your first quarter milestone.  

Here are some tips to making a PechaKucha Presentation:

• The images should tell a story
• Use as litte text as possible.
• No more than 4 images per slide
• Make things consistent

Places to find images:

• Google Search:  Images
• Flickr
• Image*After: A large, free collection of photos. Images can be downloaded and used for both personal and commercial purposes.
• Stockvault: A photo sharing site with images from designers, photographers and students. Commercial use is NOT allowed, but personal use or internal presentations is acceptable.
• morgueFile: The site name refers to old files/notes kept by criminal investigators and newspaper reporters, for use as quick references. High-res images are available for personal and commercial use, so long as the image is altered in some way.
• Pow!: A large collection/list of stock photography resources.
• iStockphoto: Royalty-free images, available for purchase based on a “credit” system. Great quality, but you need to pay for the images (worth it though).

Check out Tim Hooper's PK Fear of a Black Planet and Daniel Pink Intelligent Signage

You can create the presentations using the keynote presentation on Apple.  

Song Work

ALONE TIME from Rod Blackhurst on Vimeo.

Alone Time is about a young woman, stressed by her busy and continually crowded New York City existence spontaneously retreats to a solitary lake deep in the Adirondacks.

Today, Executive Director of Community of Unity Eric Kameroff will be presenting to Mediastorm about his work creating the idea of the "Song" as well as his work with youth.

Below is Class of 2013 Magdiel Ciego's film Student B-Boy.  Mags is working as a mentor this year and will be the professional advisor to Kevin's film which will be about dance.


Student B-boy from Mediastorm New Design on Vimeo.

I Dare You

Description:  Take This Lollipop is a 2011 interactive horror short film and Facebook app, written and directed by Jason Zada, which uses the Facebook Connect application to bring viewers themselves into the film, through use of pictures and messages from their own Facebook profiles.  The film stars actor Bill Oberst.  The film acts to personalize the undescore the danger of too much information about oneself on the interne.

Synposis from Wikipedia:  The interactive film first requests that viewers temporarily allow the application access to their Facebook account, and then incorporates information gleaned from the viewer's Facebook page to fill in details of the film itself.  Showing 'The Facebook Stalker' as a thin, creepy fellow, hunched over and typing at a computer keyboard, images provided from the accessed Facebook account begin to appear as the stalker types at his keyboard, and appears to search for the specific Facebook user who had granted access. The Stalker becomes more and more agitated as he scrolls through the discovered information, until he locates the home of the user, pulls up Google Maps, and finds directions to the user's home from geographic data contained in his or her profile. With the user's profile picture taped to its dashboard, the stalker is then seen driving in his car to the user's location, apparently to perform mayhem.  At the end of the film, a screen appears with an image of a red lollipop containing a razor blade. Below the image is the viewer's Facebook screenname and the name of the stalker's next victim as gleaned from the viewer's own profile.

Transmedia Examples

Transmedia storytelling is a technique of telling a single story or story experiences across different media outlets.  It is a relatively new experience.  Here are some examples:

American 2049 is a Facebook Game created by the Human Rights Organization Breakthrough in the hopes of advancing the human rights.  It is the first Facebook game to integrate the social networking platform with multiple resrouces including historical artifacts, real life events as well as clues.  In the game, the user is an agent of the Council on American Heritage sent to capture a fugitive Ken Asaba.  

Homeland Guantanamo is an on-line game designed to expose users to the realities of the US Detention Center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  In the game the user is an immigrant detention center as an undercover journalist.  The interactive experience brings attention to the harsh, inhumane conditions being faced yearly by nearly 300,000 people in immigrant detention as a result of unfair Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies.  Users will engage with real stories of pregnant women being forced to give birth in shackles, HIV+ people being denied medication, teenagers being separated from their families, and war veterans being placed in solitary confinement for challenging abuse.

It Gets Better is a web site started in 2010 by author Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller to help young people who face harassment.  After hearing of a number of students who took their own lives after being bullied in school, they created a site where people could people could put their own user-creatred videos.  Those videos have been viewed more than 50 million times and include messages from famous folks such as Barack Obama and Adam Lambert.  

Play with the sites in class today and tweet about one of them.

Bayette Ross Smith and Question Bridge

Question Bridge: Black Males - Project Trailer from Question Bridge on Vimeo.

Transmedia artist Bayette Ross Smith will be presenting his transmedia project Question Bridge in class today.  Question Bridge is a transmedia art project that seeks to represent and redefine Black male identity in America. Through video mediated question and answer exchange, diverse members of this "demographic" bridge economic, political, geographic, and generational divisions.

Here is the artist statement about Question Bridge:

Black Males is a project that critically explores challenging issues within the Black male community by instigating a transmedia conversation among black men across the geographic, economic, generational, educational and social strata of American society. Question Bridge provides a safe setting for necessary, honest expression and healing dialogue on themes that divide, unite and puzzle black males in the United States.  Question Bridge originated in 1996, when artist Chris Johnson was looking for a way to use media art to generate a meaningful conversation around class and generational divisions within San Diego’s African American community. Mediated through the lens of a video camera, ten members of the black community were given a format to openly express their deeply felt beliefs and values through candid question and answer exchanges. None of the questions or answers were prompted. A decade later, Hank Willis Thomas approached Johnson about collaborating to establish a similar project focused on Black men. Over the past four years, Johnson, along with Hank Willis Thomas, Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair, have traveled the nation collecting questions and answers from over 150 Black men in eleven cities including: New York, Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. The resulting video project contains of over 1,500 exchanges. By focusing on exchanges within this extended community, surprising insights and new possibilities for witnessing our common humanity emerge.

Song Mantra from CoU

Here is the Community of Unity Song mantra:  

"I have a unique mission to fulfill in this life.  For only I am capable of doing things that can be accomplish by no one else.  When I honor my inner song then my purpose will reveal itself. Though shadows of darkness and doubt may sometimes befall me, I keep going and I always return to a place of shimmering light and warmth. Then I will know with certainty that I am traveling in the right direction and will surely reach my destination in good time. " 

Yo Soy Army with Filmmaker Kouross Esmaeli

Yo Soy El Army - Clip from Big Noise Films on Vimeo.

Yo Soy El Army is filmmaker Kouross Esmaeli film about the latino community being targeted by the US military as a new and steady source of recruits.  Mostly entering into the lowest and most dangerous ranks, Latinos have been disproportionately killed in American's latest wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Kouross Esmaeli is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker and living in New York.  He will also be a guest teacher this year in Mediastorm. 

He is currently on the Board of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association and a member of the Big Noise Film collective with whom he was covered topics as varied as Iran's 2008 Parliamentary elections and the case of Louisiana's Jena 6. Kouross' work have appeared on on MTV, Current TV, Aljazeerah English and Press TV covering Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and the United States. His documentary for MTV on the lives of American soldiers and young Iraqis after the American invasion won the Edward Murrow Prize for best Television documentary in 2005. Alongside reporting and filmmaking, Kouross continues to follow his passion for teaching. Having taught at the New England Institute of Art and the School of Visual Arts in the past few years, he was also the teaching artist at Art in General Gallery in New York where he helped produce a short documentary on the repercussions of September 11 on New York's Chinatown with Pace High School in Downtown Manhattan.  He is currently enrolled in the doctoral program at NYU for media studies.

Today, we will check out the entire film followed by a Q and A with Kouross.  If you want to email Kouross in the future his email address is ke487@nyu.edu.


Yo Soy El Army: America's New Military Caste from Producciones Cimarrón on Vimeo.

You can also see more of his work on Iran and the Basijis.

After the film, tweet your thoughts and then begin on your project proposal.  It is in your google docs.  If you have not followed Scott on Twitter please do. https://twitter.com/Storm_Scott

If you have time, check out the Rooftop Legends Film from last year's class:

Rooftop Legends Video from Mediastorm New Design on Vimeo.

Your Song with JC

Today, Jean Carlos from Community of Unity (CoU) will be in class to talk to us about his interpretation of "Song." JC is a New Design graduate and now teaches for CoU at New Design.  He also was the Head Counselor at Steve's Camp.  A free summer camp for all New Design High School students.  You can learn more about them and the song on this video.

After his talk today, please ready this below from CoU.  Then, tweet what you makes you unique.  Here are some guidelines from Media Bistro about how to write a professional tweet.  They advise to:

1. Think Like Your Readers
2. Use Consistent Excellence To Stand Out From The Crowd
3. Sell The Headline (In A Non-Salesman Way)
4. Use Correct Punctuation
5. Accept Nothing Less Than Flawless Grammar And Perfect Spelling
6. Observe The Magic Retweet Number
7. Shorten All Links With Bit.ly (And Nothing Else)

Conclusion - Twitter is supposed to be fun, and doing everything by the book, or in a very methodical or rule-driven way, can sometimes make it seem just a little bit too much like hard work.
However, if you really want to succeed on the network, then you’re going to have to put in that little bit of extra effort. If you want to be consistently excellent then I’m afraid you will have to work hard – at least until it becomes second-nature. Few people are naturally wonderful, certainly all of the time.  Trust me: it’s worth the sweat. Once you see the benefits that great headline copy, can’t missunselling techniques and first-class grammar and punctuation can make to your Twitter presence and impact – as well as your website traffic, and sales – you’ll never again settle for anything less than the perfect tweet.

YOUR SONG 

Written by Community of Unity

The SONG, your SONG, is beautiful, and powerful and it is truly yours. Like a fingerprint or a snowflake, no two SONGS are the same. Your SONG is a part of what you are and who you are. It is with you, guiding you, challenging you through your life, providing opportunities to share and live your SONG as fully as possible through the choices you make.

Although every SONG is different, they are all played with the same seven INSTRUMENTS that each and every human is in possession of and has the ability to play. We play them by making choices. A choice that awakens and shares our SONG is a choice made with one or more of the seven INSTRUMENTS.

The seven INSTRUMENTS are: Self-Awareness, Self-Esteem, Sense of Humor, Empathy, Integrity, Focus, and Responsibility. When we make a choice using one of these INSTRUMENTS, we experience and express our authentic self, a sense of connectedness, and ultimately the success and fulfillment that we are searching for.

These seven INSTRUMENTS are the building blocks to success and fulfillment in all aspects of a person’s life. They are the bedrock that must be firmly in place in order to develop the values, beliefs, ideas, and personality traits that are expressed in our SONG. The INSTRUMENTS are also the vessels or containers that hold our SONG.When you are living true to your SONG, you know it. You feel it. You are at peace. You are consistent and clear and not filled with self-doubt. You don’t judge and blame others or yourself. Instead, you appreciate your life and those you are sharing it with. You know who you are. You can sing our own unique SONG with power, freedom and joy. You have awakened your authentic self, and life is good.

SEVEN INSTRUMENTS

These are the human INSTRUMENTS with which we all play and share our SONG. With these INSTRUMENTS, young people have the skills they need to successfully manage life’s challenges. When the INSTRUMENTS are awakened and developed, a person will have the essential skills they need to successfully manage life’s challenges and to awaken their true unique potential. These seven INSTRUMENTS are the building blocks to success and fulfillment in life.

1. SELF- AWARENESS is the ability to know the value you add to your world.

2. SELF-ESTEEM gives you the understanding that your thoughts, actions, and words, have an effect on other people, your surroundings, and on the life unfolding in front of you.

3. SENSE OF HUMOR is the ability to know that you can experience life with warmth, lightness and joy; and that you can express yourself in these ways as well.

4. EMPATHY is the ability to know that you can understand, to a point, the experiences of others—that other people have similar experiences and emotions, good and bad.

5. INTEGRITY is the ability to know that there can be a consistency between your thoughts, actions, and words, and your personal beliefs of what is right and wrong.

6. RESPONSIBILITY is knowing your role in creating the texture of our life from momen=t to moment through our thoughts, actions and words. The enemy of responsibility is “The Blame Game”.


7. FOCUS is knowing that you can set goals and accomplish them, with time and effort— understanding that life is a process, that you can envision desirable outcomes within the process, and that through effort you can manifest them.

Twitter Time

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service allows users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters known as "tweet".  Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey with over 500 million users and 340 million tweets daily.

To learn everything you need to know about how to use Twitter go to grovo.com's How to Use Twitter.

Today, you will sign up for a Twitter Account for the class. You will be using this account for Mediastorm activities only. If you have a twitter already you will still have to make a class specific twitter account.  Make sure you do the following:

1. User Name should be Storm_(First name). For example, I am Storm_Scott.
2. Use your New Design Email Account.
3. You will need to find my Twitter Account and follow it @Storm_Scott
4. Follow at least 20 of your classmates.
5. Follow at least five professionals in the field you are doing your mediastorm work in.  For examples, filmmakers here are some Twitter Accounts you should think about following:

Vimeo Twitter
Mediastorm Twitter
Short of the Week Twitter
Must See Shorts Twitter
Film Shortage Twitter

Mediastorm Twitter Rules:

1. All Tweets will have to be complete sentences
2. You will follow only class relevant twitter people
3. You will only get credit for high quality tweets (they are full sentences and they actually say something)
4. All Mediastorm classes will end with a tweet.  

If you have any extra time please watch this video.  Is it possible for a song to be boxing?

96 BOXING CLUB from Jérôme de Gerlache on Vimeo.

Thursday, September 11th - Inocente's Song

Inocente Official Trailer from Shine Global on Vimeo.

Mediastorm New Design is a "maker" course centered around students creating media based on their “Song”. It is believed that each person has a distinctive “Song” that is his or hers alone. The focus of this class is to help students discover and get in touch with their “Song,” as well as help navigate the waters that will allow them to "sing that song" to the best of their abilities. The course will help students explore the different life skills needed to attune such as sense of humor, self-awareness, responsibility, self-esteem, empathy, integrity and focus. Students will be asked to bring something into existence (make) a media product that reflects their “Song.”

INOCENTE, an intensely personal coming-of-age documentary about a vibrant Latina teenage artist from a dauntingly tough background in San Diego who refuses to allow her struggles with poverty and homelessness to get in the way of her extraordinary talent.  Her song is incredibly strong.

The film was made by Shine Global.  SG is dedicated to ending the abuse and exploitation of children worldwide through the production of films and other media that raise awareness, promote action and inspire political change.  Since 2005, Shine Global has given voice to some of the world’s most at-risk children, shared their stories, inspired millions of viewers, and won more than 20 major film awards, including an Academy Award nomination and Best Director Documentary at Sundance.  Their first movie, WAR DANCE, tells the stories of three children in the northern Uganda war zone who found hope and renewal in a national dance competition.

Here is what they are working on now:

Selling Our Daughters - in Development Trailer from Shine Global on Vimeo.

Tuesday, September 10th - Marina, Jay Z and You

Jay-Z - Picasso Baby - Clean (Extendz) from DJ Diztracted on Vimeo.

Marina Abramović is a New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the "grandmother of performance art.' Here is Marina's description of performance art. Her show at Musuem of Modern Art (MOMA) in 2010 has been call revolutionary. During the three month show she would sit in silence across from people from the museum audience. Visitors were encouraged to sit silently across from the artist for a duration of their choosing, becoming participants in the artwork. This comprehensive photo gallery contains a record of each participant. You can see the portraits of people who sat across from her and you an amazingly wide range of emotions. The Artist Is Present is Abramovic’s longest performance to date with a total of 750 hours.  Abramović remained silent and still, enduring thirst, hunger, and back pain (and speculation as to how, exactly, she was or was not peeing), while visitors, confronted with her placid gaze, variously wept, vomited, stripped naked, and proposed marriage.  All in all it seems like a crazy affair.  Why? 

Jay-Z decided to present his own take on Abramović’s piece—rapping for six hours in front of a rotating cast of art-world V.I.P.s—viewers’ primary response was to get up and dance.  He  continuously performrf “Picasso Baby,” the second song on his new album, “Magna Carta… Holy Grail,” to a succession of visual artists, museum directors, gallerists, Hollywood folk, and Pablo’s granddaughter Diana Widmaier Picasso.  New Yorker Magazine described it as:

These guests took turns on or near a wooden bench positioned across from a low platform on which the rapper stood, except when he was prowling around. A crowd of less famous art-world denizens and cool-looking people (some of whom had been specially cast) loitered along the walls of the gallery, except when they were invited to scurry right up to Jay-Z. Roving steady-cam operators followed the instructions of Mark Romanek, the director of what will become a music video featuring more middle-aged white people than are usually in rap videos.

When Abramović appeared, serene, in a voluminous black gown, the room fell silent. “I need energy from everybody. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” a member of the production crew barked to the stunned crowd. The artist slunk in, discarding her shoes and her belt along the way, holding her arms out to the side, palms facing forward. What followed was a slow, seductive dance, the artist and the rapper pacing around, staring intently into each other’s eyes, occasionally pressing their foreheads together, the mind-meld complete. “I had no idea what I was going to do,” Abramović said afterward. “I just came here and felt the energy. I love his music, because it’s social issues, it’s political, and really goes to everybody’s heart. It’s so good. It’s like a volcano.”

Check out Marina and Jay Z.

Check out some of the different medias made from the performamnce:
Animated Music Video
Taylor Swift
Performance with Jay-Z Interview

Here is a version with more of the freestyling Jay-Z

jay-z-realartfull from klaus bomax on Vimeo.

Welcome to Mediastorm

Description of Song from Community of Unity 2012 from Graham Parker on Vimeo.

Mediastorm New Design is a media maker course centered around students creating media based on their “Song”.  It is believed that each person has a distinctive “Song” that is his or hers alone.  The focus of this class is to help students discover and get in touch with their “Song,” as well as help navigate the waters that will allow them to sing that song to the best of their abilities.  The course will help students explore the different life skills needed to attune such as sense of humor, self-awareness, responsibility, self-esteem, empathy, integrity and focus.  Students will be asked to bring something into existence (make) a media product that reflects their “Song.”  THe course will help students learn and examine the history and current landscape of the media with a focus on transmedia.  Transmedia storytelling is a technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.  Students will be asked to create content that engages an audience in their daily lives using various techniques.  Stories will be developed across multiple forms of media to deliver the content.  The content will need to be synchronized and linked together in each media channel.  The course will use a flipped classroom model and be heavily influenced by design based thinking, the maker movement and social media innovation.  

Course Days and Times:

• Mondays 12:20-1:10
• Tuesdays 1:40-2:55, Office Hours 3:00-3:45 in Room 418
• Thursdays: 10:18-11:33
• Fridays: 8:58-9:48

Teacher(s): Dr. Scott Conti

• Dr. Scott Conti - scottconti@newdesignhigh.com
• Guest Teachers:  Kouross Esmail, Suha Araj
• Partner Organizations: Community of Unity

Policies:

• Attendance - Attendance is the single largest predictor of success in school.  When you attend school and do your best in class, you set yourself up for success.  Each absence hurts your opportunity to do well in this class.  If you miss class and it is excused, you may come after school during Office Hours to make up what you missed for credit.  Lateness - Class starts at the second bell. If you come after the bell, you must get a late pass. When you are late to class, you do not earn credit for activities that you miss.  All assignments and instructions will be kept on the class blog.  You are mandated to read it class blog entry.  Assignments must be handed in before the end of each quarter.  Milestones are allowed to be late if permission is given by Scott.  You will only be graded for what you professional produce.  

Grading:

• 20% Professionalism - attendance and punctuality, participation in class, engagement in class
• 30% Milestones - The actual milestone and all revisions leading up to the milestone;

• 50% Daily Assignments - twitter, blogs and other social media