Snap Z and Audacity are two very powerful programs that I want to continue to understand better. It appears that they are great for copying copyrighted material for yourself. I’m sure that’s what distributors argue goes on at colleges, but it is an amazing luxury to be able to make my own mp3s from streaming audio.
While this will help me enjoy video and music from online sources, I do believe that there are lots of ways these programs can help traditional forms of media. For a different film class, we were encouraged to use Snap Z to show stills from the movies or scenes we were writing about. Not only did having a picture there make it easier for the reader, it kept the author honest because we were no longer able to fudge details about a movie that may have not been there. When there is physical evidence on the subject you are discussing, it allows you to write more precisely and descriptively than not having the screen cap there.
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FYI: Snap Z is not the only way to get media from the internet. You can get audio for free (up to ten minutes) from audio hijack http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/18611 .
Also you can download FireFox add-ons that allow you to easily capture video from youtube and the likes. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006
I just discovered these tools, but I look forward to *appropriating* media even when I don’t have access to Midd’s resources.
I also took that class, Brian, and I was struck by how reluctant we all were to actually use Snap Z at first. Since it was a senior seminar, we’d all taken film classes before and were used to writing about the medium, and maybe that was the problem. We had been so trained to think of film as only something you could write about…to tell, and not show, to use McCloud’s metaphor. And the “showing” added so much to our arguments, both in terms of clarity for the reader and as a constant reference to use for critical thought.