Topic: What To Do With Video

(for Africanists and non-Africanists alike)
A Seminar by Patrick McNaughton

Soon all college professors & museum curators will be making their own media (CD's, Videos,
Web Sites), and having the ability will be a huge job-market plus.  Meanwhile, excellent and
terrible videos on all kinds of artistic subjects come out every year.  At the same time, kids
coming out of high school find educational videos excruciatingly boring.  Furthermore, videos
are a art form in and of themselves, and demand good creative technique to be effective.  Finally,
problems of representation and assertion about i vide0-how can you tell when art, people and
culture are being unfairly portrayed and how can you prevent it in your own video?

All these things will be explored in this seminar.  We will focus on 1) how films & videos can be
used effectively in classrooms and museums.  2) how we scholars can use them in our own
research.  3) how we can make them ourselves and then use them as effective teaching and
research tools.  We will consider videos on Africa, Oceania and the Western World.  We will read
texts and discuss them-screen videos and critique them-and brainstorm on how to make our own
video.  In fact, we will make our own video.

Of special Interest:
Professional demonstrations wit a VHS editor (standard home-view «" tape), linear editor
(professional quality tape), non-linear editor (professional quality DVD), scripting and
storyboarding.  We may also explore modeling (classroom role-playing based on issues &
problems encountered in a video).

Recommended for:
Graduate students in art history, studio, history, folklore, literature, anthropology and
ethnomusicology.