DVP Assignment Description

For the Digital Video Project (DVP) students will cut, edit, and remix instructional, educational, or ephemeral film footage from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, or 70s (with other elements they deem rhetorically fitting) in an attempt to provide some social/cultural critical commentary. This, as expected, is an enormously broad directive, which leaves the door wide open for a variety of possibilities, but which also requires a lot of student self-direction and critical conceptualization.

The nuts and bolts:
- must incorporate at least 3 communicational modes (moving/still images, non-native audio, oral discourse, text, etc.)
- must be 120 to 300 seconds in length
- must include credits and sources (including separate, complete work cited [following the MLA citation guidelines])
- must use at least 5 "cuts" (breaks in the native video flow)
- must utilize public domain footage, and/or footage that allows derivatives.
     Finding this kind of footage can be most readily located in the Internet Archives;
     we suggest starting with productions/collections by Coronet Instructional Films 
     (http://www.archive.org/details/coronet_instructional_videos), the A/V Geeks
     (http://www.archive.org/details/avgeeks), or the Prelinger Archives 
     (http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger).

Beyond those guidelines, students' options are really wide open. They can weave in real-action footage they shoot themselves or sample multiple sources (film and audio) in addition to using the educational films as core content; they can create minor montage sequences; they can create 3 or 4 smaller projects that work together to make critical commentary; they can create micro-narratives, satires, ironies, tragedies and so on.

In addition to the video production, students will also be required to complete 2 shorter Critical Reflection Papers (what we call the McLuhan Reflections, for reasons that will be obvious).
- The first (250-500 words in length), should focus on the medium, on the experience of working
   in/with/across digital video and how that experience relates to traditional writing.
- The second (250-500 words in length), should focus on the message, on the attempted rhetorical
   moves, on the editing techniques themselves and why various edits, cuts, mashups, etc. were done
   (what was their intended effect).

Registered members of the site can find PDFs of the CFMPs below.  Also, a photocopy friendly version of this DVP Assignment is included below (DVP_AssignmentDescription.pdf) should you wish to print and disperse to your students.  For unregistered members, you can copy and paste the description above or send a request via email to thejump.dwrl@gmail.com