Documentary filmmaking is a subcategory of film and video production where the production crew creates a work of journalism rather than a fictional movie. Instead of making up fictional characters and creating a world of make-believe, the documentary filmmaker’s job is to document real life and real people by accurately and fairly telling their stories. Journalism […]
Character Marketing: Why So Many Advertisements Feature Branding Characters
Take a look at this picture of eight marketing characters used to advertise national brands. How many of them do you recognize? Do you know what product they represent? Every single time I showed pictures like this to my media students, they instantly knew almost every single character They knew both the character name and […]
Let’s Make a TV Commercial!
Now that you have studied character marketing, it is time to come up with a product, a character and a commercial! Guidelines for your TV Commercial Project Your assignment is to create and produce a TV commercial using at least one character. Your commercial will promote a product using your character. Remember, your character should […]
Video Editing: Historical Perspective on Linear and Nonlinear Video Editing
Computers completely revolutionized video editing. Before computers, video editing was more expensive and slow. It took tons of expensive equipment, a whole roomful if you got into big-budget production. The skills and techniques used were completely different from modern computer editing. For the most part, video editing on these old systems was only done by […]
How to Create Original Characters for Your Movie
BUILDING CHARACTERS FOR A MOVIE When creating characters for a movie, consider the many different ways people behave, look and speak. Do you know anyone like this in real life? It always helps to follow the writer’s adage: “write what you know.” You can learn by imitating what has been done to create popular characters […]
Thoughts on Fixing the News Media
WHY IS THE NEWS MEDIA SO DESTRUCTIVE AND HOW CAN WE FIX IT? When I contemplate the full repercussions of the 24-hour, anything-in-the-world-goes information cycle, it scares me a bit. In my observation, as well as shown scientifically, humans are alarmingly susceptible to succumbing their will to authoritarian information and directives. It seems to be […]