I was so impressed with my students’ final projects in Visual and Cultural Studies! Overall, they made a very strong showing in their five-minute critical analysis videos. The assignment was fairly open in terms of content, as we were spending several evenings conducting hands-on work in the multimedia lab, but in general, I’d asked them to pick one of three topics and create a brief, scripted video analysis with voice-over narration. Students could analyze a film (we’d watched Source Code in class, and worked with it to see how gender, race, ability, and technology were being presented in a mass-market film), analyze a television commercial, from any cable or satellite service which they could get from the AAA Satellite TV services online. Most chose to analyze a commercial, and almost everyone worked with gender–I want to think about ways to ensure that doesn’t happen in the future. Some were particularly effective, but everyone completed the project and learned something new! Here are a few I thought worked particularly well:
Source Code & Gender Relations in the Media
Being the Man with Imagination
Exploring Exclusivity and Rhetoric in Girl World
Modern Women: A Visual Representation in the Media
If you watch any, please leave the author a comment!
Tonya Howe 