Here’s Kyle and my Prestige video. I think the video went over well in class.
This assignment initially seemed quite daunting, but once Kyle and I actually sat down and started to brainstorm, the ideas came quickly and developed even more rapidly as we came across more clips scouring the film for appropriate quotes and shots.
We had very little trouble with SnapZ, but I can complain about free use and copyright all day (A Fair(y) Use Tale comes to mind immediately). I’m pretty sure everyone agrees that this assignment (and any academic assignment in general, especially if it uses shortened clips) fits under fair use clauses, but it’s difficult to make exceptions to bypass copyright laws. I think we’re in a bit of an awkward stage in which enforcing agencies don’t fully grasp how futile their struggle against new technologies is, and the people that suffer are the ones that want to follow the rules. Technology is advancing at a much more rapid pace than marketing. If one were to fill their 80GB (it’s the smallest size now) iPod with .99 cent songs, it would run them approximately $20,000! The only people who are forced to sit through FBI warnings on DVDs are those who buy the actual film instead of ripping the “operation prohibited by disc” features off their pirated DVDs, the people who earnestly pay their hard-earned money for a game like Spore get trapped by ridiculous DRM policies, and the poor people still buying CDs are paying through the teeth. Although a lot of distributors have not grasped the scope and continue to fight new technologies, some creators are embracing the digital revolution and acting intelligently and accordingly. Radiohead and Trent Reznor of NIN come to mind…release free lower-quality music and make profits off donations, concert sales, CD art/collectibles, and higher-quality music releases (NIN has released 3 free albums this year alone).
The Slip, one of NIN’s multiple free albums
Alright…back to Kyle and my project…As stated in class, we wanted to explicitly analyze the relationships between the two “Bordens” (Borden and Fallon in Borden guise) and their respective love interests. To do so, we initially come up with the idea of showing the 2×2 grid of each interaction (Borden, Olivia, Fallon, and Sarah), intercutting with an applicable quote from the movie. We then decided that in order to more obviously signify which brother is which to a naive audience (which certainly changes the nature of the text and presentation), we would employ a powerful stylistic technique (we thought about a few things before we came to the idea of black & white vs. color). Finally, after we got the four scenes in their appropriate color, we wanted to bookend the stylistic theme with scenes that contained a transition between the two colors (and brothers). I think starting with a transition like this really primes the audience to be cued into color for subsequent scenes and the dubbed clips over black answer a lot of the questions. We ended on a somber note with a clip of Sarah hanging herself, depicting the aftermath of these two brothers’ decision to share each other’s lives so intimately.
I really enjoyed working with Kyle and the assignment proved more fun that I initially believed it could be. In the future, perhaps showing an example from previous classes could get students’ creative juices and motivation levels flowing sooner.