03 March 2016: Understanding Connected Learning

So I'm really into musicals. 98% of my readership may have just dropped out after that first sentence, but for the remaining 2%, I'm hoping this anecdote will help illustrate the topics I touch on in this blog. Musicals are a niche market and hard sell for anyone who really likes... you know... living in reality. But I digress. So. Musicals.

If you've been keeping up with music recently, you'd know that the 2016 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album was awarded to the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Hamilton: An American Musical.

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Hamilton's overwhelmingly positive critical reception is a result not only of its stellar production quality. The libretto was written by lyrical genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, and it tells the biographical story of America's most-overlooked founding father, Alexander Hamilton, and the events of his life that eventually led to his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.

A musical about the American Revolution performed in period costume is not a revolutionary concept. What makes Hamilton revolutionary is its decision to tell the story of America's beginnings through a multi-racial cast of actors and actresses who would, in any other retelling of our nation's history, play no significant part whatsoever. The songs are not musical theatre standards - they're sung in the styles rap, hip-hop, reggae and R&B genres of music that were born in communities of color. Hamilton takes a traditionally white-dominated medium and uses it to showcase those who are so often ignored in history lessons; it adapts the subject matter to create a story that both honors an extraordinary man while also reclaiming elements of his story for minorities to relate back to their American experience.

What I'm interested in talking about is the aftermath of Hamilton. The cast's Grammy performance understandably led to a large spike in interest in February of 2016, but prior to that, Hamilton had been steadily growing a community of die-hard fans online since its opening a year prior. Fan-made artworks, fanfiction, and the regular fandom fare was generated but with a unique twist: with Hamilton being a work based so heavily in historical non-fiction (Ron Chernow's thorough biography of Alexander Hamilton served as the main source material for the show), fan-generated works began retelling other historical events with the same air of remix and tinges of pop culture.

One innovative musical breathed new life into the old, musty memories of elementary school history classes and 4th grade colonial days. American History began to be memed. Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, news sources and more erupted in a tsunami of dialogue regarding Hamilton that continues to span over topics of music, history, social activism, feminism, racism, philosophy, psychology, government, education, literature and more. Musical theatre geeks, history buffs, and every impassioned nerd in between took to the Web to dissect and connect and discourse over a singular work of art.

The craziest part of all?

The majority of people involved in these discussions have never seen the musical performed.

Does it all chalk up to hearsay? Or perhaps something more?

While it's not connected learning in the purest academic sense, I love this example. I think it speaks to the power not only of sharing work, but also of building communities and (re)discovering interests through Web-based connections. Community is, in my opinion the most valuable and tangibly enjoyable aspect of connected learning. When the day came to create a video about connected learning at ALT Lab, I knew I wanted to incorporate a cohesive style that speaks to that idea.

 The aesthetic of this video is rather simple -- I used lots of smooth, vector-based images and pastel-tinged colors to create a friendly, stylized environment in which our characters (including Molly) would demonstrate the more technical aspects of connected learning. The world of aggregation, syndication, tagging, setting up plugins and every other tool we use to create Web-based connections can be daunting for a beginner-- I thought it was important to lay things out as clearly and unembellished as possible. With the exception of video samples, all the elements in this video were born in the same stylistic world. They make sense together.

That visual continuity helps make the illustration of harder-to-get topics a little easier. I loved using clean lines to communicate the exchange of information between instructors, students, and online resources. One of my favorite things to animate was the white, thin "web of ideas" (there has to be a better term for that, ha!) that floats behind Molly in the opening sequence. I think that simplicity can be just as (if nor more) powerful as complexity when it comes to communicating visual information.

I hope that this video helps guide newcomers through connected learning in a way that helps them understand how to use these tools to expand their horizons. As my long-winded story about Hamilton shows, sharing your passions can end up like a pebble thrown into a lake -- the ripple expands beyond itself, widening and widening until it touches new shores all around. Connected learning offers a means of accomplishing this in ways that are efficient, trackable and most importantly, beneficial to community building.

Til next time,

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12 February 2016: The Story's in the Telling

You've probably already heard loads about the FI Video Collective from Molly B., but today I'd like to touch on an aspect of production that tends to go under-appreciated by most folks who work in that world. Maybe '"under-appreciated" is the wrong word... "under-estimated?" "unnoticed?" Neither of those work either. It's a sort of nuanced thing, what I'm trying to get at.

Most people who consider themselves creatives remember themselves as ALWAYS being such -- as children, playing pretend in imaginary worlds with a knack for theatrics and storytelling through artwork, sounds, or other means. I certainly remember playing out (needlessly overcomplicated) story lines with plastic toys from Happy Meals -- I don't ever remember a time when a simple creative activity wasn't touched by a story in the background. There was always pretext, context, and a greater structure or system that guided my creative decision-making.

This is already sounding kind of pompous, but bear with me. I guess what I'm trying to say is this: in my most recent project, I had to adopt the position of someone who isn't used to making "creative translations," or connecting one form of creative expression to another. Creatives are generally well-acquainted with conceptualizing ideas while dipping in and out of the possibilities of one art form to another. (For example, a videographer like Max can be told an idea for a story, and his brain will naturally generate ideas of composition and staging while also considering potential audio and graphic components, and he can visualize how all those things would synthesize into one final product.)

Since embarking on the scripting phase of the FIVC, it's become clear that we need to provide participants with an idea of how to adapt words into visuals -- specifically, visuals that propel a narrative. I took on the task of making this educational tool, and it really forced me to reflect on habits that I take for granted.

I wrote a script for myself that breaks down a split-script document into its separate parts, and then goes on to explain how to use those separate parts to construct a piece of sequential art -- namely, a storyboard. Over and over again I found myself back-tracking over what I'd written, imagining a student that wouldn't know what "shot," "frame," or "beat" meant. I left those words out, would I still be clear enough? How much can you expect someone to know off the bat? Can you expect anything?

I understand why some production artists come off as snobs (and some people totally are snobs), but I think at times, there's also a weird language barrier that develops when people get engrossed in their craft -- they forget that most people don't understand the special codes and words and inside jokes that come along with a specialization. For some disciplines this might not matter as much (I used to work at an HVAC office and felt really OK not knowing ventilation-speak)... but when it comes to creative processes like filmmaking and music-making, it can be a very negative thing. The last thing you want to do as a collaborative creative (or collaborative anything) is make people feel intimidated or discouraged to participate before they understand what's going on.

That was a big tangent, but hey -- this is my blog post!

Long story short, making this latest piece of educational media made me very conscientious of the privilege I have as someone who gets to work creatively the majority of the time. Overthinking aside, I really enjoyed the process of breaking down scripting and storyboarding into something a beginner could understand. Saying you're "turning words into pictures" is so vague and contains such a broad range of possibilities... it'd be easy for anyone to get overwhelmed. I'm hopeful that this video will help FI students wrap their heads around how to "turn words into pictures" in a more defined way that'll help them develop their own storytelling voices.

As I think about it, "creative translations" might just be another way of wording the idea of multimodal learning. The steps of acquiring or creating material, analyzing it, translating it, and synthesizing it into something that expands its original significance into something bigger, or better, or different are all so important to becoming a better learner. Without the ability to translate an idea into a different perspective (or in this case, a different medium), your ideas stay stagnant. Or worse, dormant.

Uh oh. Is this blog post turning into a connected learning soapbox session? (;

I'll leave this stream of consciousness at that. Take a gander at 'Script to Storyboard 101' for an introduction to creative translations. More updates to come as the FIVC rolls on!

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11 January 2016 : 2015 Recap - Godzilla

The final weeks of the Fall 2015 Semester were a whirlwind. The project that consumed most of my time during this home stretch was a video that had been in the works since October - a course trailer for a Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness course taught by Professor Natalie Baker.

Natalie was a TON of fun to work with. She approached the Innovative Learning Media  team at ALT Lab with a very specific vision for her course trailer, and when we learned her aesthetic would largely include Japanese sea monsters and Snoop Dogg it became pretty impossible to resist.

The general gist of the video was this: in a post-apocalyptic world, Natalie and her Godzilla companion would be performing a rap about media portrayals of disasters and the problematic elements that accompany them. Is this reading as "too much sake" yet? Read on, dear reader.

This project required the construction of a world made entirely from scratch. Our awesome student worker, Michael Couchman of VCUarts Department of Graphic Design, took on the role of art director and began gathering and arranging elements for the Look while our team tackled the video and audio production elements with Natalie. Michael came up with this crazy good collage-y look that merged old, noisey photographs and muted, toxic-looking colors. The result was both wonderful and nauseating. Michael's environments were very fun to work with, and I was excited to start deconstructing them when the animation phase began.

Here's a quick mock-up we sent to Natalie of how we envisioned one given frame to look. 

These are the sorts of projects where my God complex begins to show, haha! The thing I'm drawn to most in animation is the creative freedom -- if you can imagine it, you can find a way to portray it. Your vision can be as specific as the time you are willing to invest in it. Video production can produce astounding images, but I often find myself frustrated by the limitations of lighting, actors, time, multiple takes... Maybe it's a sign I need to develop more patience, but in any case, this particular project was a great outlet for me creatively. Michael's world was a great backdrop for some of the new techniques I wanted to try.

After receiving Michael's environments and assets and the sweetened rap audio from Max, I set to work breaking them apart. There are quicker ways to animate puppets in Adobe After Effects (and I'm sure that Adobe Character Animator will expedite this process even more moving forward), but in order to maintain consistency across the board, I broke each image down as much as I could (even further than Michael already had, which is saying something), separating hands, feet, jaws, and heads into separate layers. Each character existed within their own Composition, and would be placed, animated, and timed appropriately depending on the frame that was being animated. Time intensive? Yes, but totally worth it if it meant easy transferability. The backgrounds themselves were also animated along a 3D axis, which helped to push some of the "believability" of the world, mainly the existence of a depth of field.

The future of educational media, y'all.

Along with our multiple Godzilla characters and Natalie-in-a-Hazmat-Suit character, there were also several still and video elements that came into play as well. In order to create the 34 separate shots that the video ultimately comprised, I ended up working with about 300 or so layers in AE. Let's just say I learned a LOT more about how to use color coding and naming structures over the course of this project.

The finished product?

Looking at this project now, I still see glitches and timing issues I'm dissatisfied with... but they don't eclipse how happy I am that this video got completed at all. Our team was very often crunched for time during the past year, so it's pretty incredible that we managed to crank out a piece that is SO animation heavy. I'm also really thankful to Molly and Natalie for allowing me to get silly and push some of the more ridiculous elements of the video. There are unavoidable NSFW aspects that come into play when you're using gangster rap in an educational video... but playing it "safe" would have cheated this video out of some of its charm and humor, and those are 2 attributes that become increasingly important when trying to emotionally connect an audience with subject matter that's -actually- pretty important.

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16 September 2015: Channeling Audobon

Before I left for SIGGRAPH, our creative team had been given the awesome task of creating several videos for the Department of Biology. These videos highlight some of the exciting research and field work that undergraduate and professional students embark on as they pursue their concentrations of interest. These are the types of assignments that are especially exciting for those of us working in production, as they mean we get the rare opportunity to bring a camera into the thick of a swamp, tidal wetlands, into canoes, and other places more way adventurous than the studio. You break out the galoshes, sunscreen, bug spray, UV filters and essentially pretend you're camera-manning for Steve Irwin. It's a trip.

For this assignment, I faced the same fate as many post-production specialists on exciting shoots -- which is, I didn't go. Boo. Instead, I was tasked with creating the animated assets for the video, which proved to be an expedition of its own.

Using the paintings of renowned 17th century wildlife artist John James Audubon as inspiration, I wanted to create an aesthetic that, while maintaining a sort of classically idyllic, exceptional naturalism, still moved in a way that looked modern and lifelike. Lesley Bullock's class is a real merger of centuries-tested ornithology techniques and 21st century data collection, so combining the 2 stylistic ideas reflected what we hoped to communicate about the course itself.

A preliminary sketch

To bring Audubon's paintings to life, I had to think like Audubon -- meaning that I took a bunch of assets and turned them into a monster composition, as one would a large-scale painting. I deconstructed several of Audubon's paintings in Photoshop, and animated each as their own composition in Photoshop -- fish were made to swim, birds flit, etc. Once they were all properly animated, I brought each composition into my main "Opening Sequence" comp and re-timed each so that every asset would have a brief moment as the camera's point of focus. 

I really love the way this composition looks when you step back from it; From a distance, there are obvious tricks at work to fool the camera's eye as it travels the piece (big scaling differences, for example. Dealing with Zoom/Point of Focus keys in AE can be a little tricky, so this was my quick workaround). I like that even this small sample of Audubon's work still looks pretty lush.

I feel that the time constraints of the video led to the camera having to pass over the scene too quickly, a little jaggedly; but in the future, I'd love to flesh this sort of composition out even further, with more assets, more subtle movements, and more time for the camera to travel over them and really take in the scene.

That's about 200 layers of greenery, waterfowl, fish and feathers.

While the opening sequence was the main chunk of my work on this vid, I also had the opportunity to create some additional graphics for warbler migration patterns and lower thirds, too... and don't get me started talking about lower 3rds. Those are so much fun.

This project was a great exercise in combining dozens of tinier compositions into a single massive scene, and it's a technique that I can't wait to apply to out next Biology Researchers vid. To see the finished video (with editing by the ever-slick Max), you can mozy on over here.

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8 September 2015: SIGGRAPH 2015

I'm realizing that for all my unabashed gushing this past year, I have yet to sit down and actually talk about SIGGRAPH 2015.

As Molly, Max, and Alana can tell you, I never freaking shut up about SIGGRAPH (and the last few months were particularly bad... sorry y'all). For the uninitiated, SIGGRAPH is "the name of the annual conference on computer graphics (CG) convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization." In a nutshell, it's the yearly convergence and showcase of the best art, technology, engineering, and computing accomplishments of the last year. It's a maelstrom of wonderful, geeky things.

If you're interested in learning about what went down at this year's SIGGRAPH, you can enjoy the official conference recaps and the copious number of technical reviews. They're hugely informative and fun to watch/read. However, conference content is not what I'm gonna be talking about in this post.

The whole 2015 SV team (+ blazing heat)

This year, I served as Communications Lead for the Student Volunteer Subcommittee (SVSC for short) for the SIGGRAPH Student Volunteer Program. I accepted this position in October of 2014, and along with it a 2-year commitment to serve the Program at both the 2015 and 2016 conferences. Getting this job was a huge long-shot to my mind, and I'm still bouncing off the walls at the fact that I get to do it.

I found out about SIGGRAPH my junior year of undergrad (2013), and after applying, getting accepted, and serving for an insanely awesome week, I was hooked on the experience. However, by that time I was a year shy of being ineligible for the program completely. I volunteered again as a Team Leader at the 2014 conference, pretty much accepting that this might be it. I didn't anticipate making the jump from volunteer to subcommittee member but am happy to report that it's been nothing short of a fantastic full-steam learning experience with some of the best people I know. I'm so happy I get to repeat it all this coming year as Marketing Lead and generate some evergreen deliverables that can serve the program for future volunteers and committees.

Beyond that, who knows what my involvement with the Student Volunteer Program will be. Some people have told me what it should be... but for now I'm taking things one conference at a time. Fingers crossed.

</ life story >

So. SIGGRAPH 2015.  

Ashley (aka AshToDaMAX) and me, basically summing up what we do all week. Over and out!

The Student Volunteer Program essentially serves as the bulk of (if not complete) operational support for the conference. These students are the ones checking badges, manning doors, tallying room counts, delivering supplies, assisting contributors, demoing new technologies, answering attendee questions, solving bizarre problems, monitoring illegal recording -- you name it, a volunteer probably does it. Our volunteer force came in at a whopping 374 Student Volunteers -- tack on an additional 21 Team Leaders, 6 Subcommittee members, and a handful of awesome helpful SV alumni and you have about 400 folks making up the entire team.

 SIGGRAPH took place at the Los Angeles Convention Center -- a 720,000 square foot facility that would house ev.ery.thing. It's the job of the SV Program to make sure every area is appropriately staffed. No small task.

The Los Angeles Convention Center

To date, this is the largest volunteer force I've ever worked with on a project/event, and being in a higher-level management position was both daunting and exhilarating. Being relatively new (there are some 5+ year veterans in the program, giving you an idea of how dedicated folks can be), I tend to feel like a greenhorn and hope the sounds coming out of my mouth aren't totally naive. This year, we were gifted with an extremely capable and self-motivated group of volunteers... and I largely credit their performance with helping me fill out my boots. The amount of uncomfortable conflict-resolution I thought I might do was considerably less than I imagined (but then again, I'm a serial overthinker).

But before I get too self-deprecating, I have to say that despite some loneliness here and there, being a leader feels really cool. I know this post is devolving into another gush-fest but hear me out. It could be a personality thing, but being in an environment that's energetic and fast-paced and busy and your ~#1 BIG JOB~ is to help others... it's like, the most addictive feeling to me. There's always a job to be done, always a question to be answered, always another opportunity to do something that could make somebody's day. Being one of the folks that people come to specifically for that purpose feels really gratifying. OK, the more I write about it, the more I see the ego behind this... Let me sum it up by saying helping others is cool, it feels good, it boosts your self-esteem, everyone should get into it.

Business in the front, party in the back; Team Leaders and us, the SVSC.

The conference itself ran from August 9 -13, and it went by really fast. Operationally, SIGGRAPH 2015 went off without a hitch. There were no major malfunctions, no huge logistical mishaps, no full-stop issues, and no (dare I say it over walkie-talke?) emergencies. This is pretty unheard of. I and the rest of the SVSC have to credit Christine Holmes, the 2015 Program Chair, for this. I've met very few people as dedicated, thorough, considerate as Christine, and it was through her efforts that so much of our jobs were made easier. I'm so honored I got to work on her team.

Our Team Leaders performed amazingly, too, and by the end of the week we were floored to see how closely that group of 21 had bonded with each other. I'll always feel a little bit like a matchmaker knowing how Team Leaders were selected, and it's actually an amazing feeling to know that your careful considerations of applications led to a specially-crafted team with a pretty remarkable balance of personalities and work styles. Everyone leaves SIGGRAPH feeling a little more grown, but this is especially true for Team Leaders. I was really happy to see that after a 60-hour week of individual struggles and learning-curves, this group was emerging stronger and more confident than when they walked in.

I'll also take a minute to mention those not involved with the Student Volunteer Program who were essential to its success: Cindy, Paul, Mandie, and Marcia in Conference Management, Peter and Sam from Security, Marc Barr the Conference Chair were - are - all awesome advocates for the work the Student Volunteer Program hopes to accomplish. On-site, they gave us support in an environment where it's common for people to regard Student Volunteers as just students -- and not the asset they truly are. During the craziness of the conference, it's easy to get stuck in the microcosm of the Program and forget all the hard work and effort that comes from the outside. They'll always remind me to look beyond my workload and appreciate the big picture.

Sam, myself, Fahad and Peter. Peter and Sam are the most hilarious security personnel you will EVER meet. EVER.

Took a minute to cheese with some fellow VCU Rams in the SV Photobooth

Apart from the day to day hard work and operations, SIGGRAPH also involves a lot of partying, hard drinking, dancing, laughing, sleep deprivation, and general great times with friends you only get to see once a year. As you can imagine, returning to ALT Lab after 10 days of this was hard. There's no denying that volunteering at SIGGRAPH is a huge emotional high, and lots of folks feel a similar come down when they return to "normal" life.

Now that I've had some time to process the experience, I'm realizing more than ever that attitude is so integral to accomplishing good work. Imagine a world where every work week is approached with the same enthusiasm and drive as a 5-day conference -- what would get done? Or better, what wouldn't get done? If we treated our colleagues like they were only here for a week, how would that affect team morale? What would that level of output look like? Not saying that maintaining a high level of enthusiasm every day is sustainable, but what reason is there to not at least start each day out with a similar feeling?

A lot of people describe coming to SIGGRAPH as a yearly refueling -- it reinvigorates the creative spirit and inspires folks to tackle the goals they might've been hesitant to go after before. I find this to be more and more true each year. This year's conference has given me clearer direction both professionally and personally, as it usually does. This conference, along with every other, is an experience I'll keep close to my heart.

Here's to next year, Anaheim!

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17 July 2015

A forgotten London doodle - "Single Camera Shoot vs. Women's PantsPockets"

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Rambling - Part Three: DML, LA, & LA

Lesson 3: Rules are for squares.

Beyond the amazing Indian food, disconcerting sights at Venice Beach, and finding our way into a speakeasy, DML in Los Angeles was a pretty overwhelming experience. Walking in, I thought its theme, 'Equity by Design,' was meant for the conversation of equalizing access to platforms; more of the nuts and bolts of building networks for connected learning. Instead, the talks were nearly all centered around social equality, and the focus was on the people and communities that make up the networks we use to learn. Even though the material was heavy, it was a really pleasant surprise. I find personal stories far more compelling than purely research-based presentations, and DML had no shortage of diverse and inspiring speakers sharing their struggles and successes in opening up the world of connected learning to their respective communities.

Faced with all this information about how cultural and societal structures limit our ability to make progress, it's easy to feel like all your efforts mean nothing. Seriously. I don't say that to sound fatalistic, it's just the truth. So many of the presentations talked about challenges of crime, poverty, and violence that all stem from larger injustices, and much of the work being done by non-profits and other educational institutions are (essentially) a series of workarounds* of existing, flawed systems.

 

(*which is not to say that people aren't completing significant, game-changing work. They are, and it's awesome.)

On an interesting related note, though, I noticed that the seemingly biggest presences at DML were the grassroots-based activists: Harry Potter Alliance, The Dinner Party, Dream Defenders, Roadtrip Nation, to name a few. Organizations that came together from their schools, churches, and the umbrellas of their shared interests to pursue goals of bettering their community. These groups weren't ordered to do anything, their missions don't stem from a 20-year plan laid out by a larger organization -- their calls to action were inspired by passion and a commitment to making change.

The takeaway for me was this: screw the rules. Genuine change can only be accomplished if, in addition to furthering one cause, opposing causes and obstacles are actively resisted. The current state of education in this country is discouraging -- it's restrictive, bureaucratic, and too focused on maintaining the status quo instead of evolving (fear of growing pains?). The people who are making change in their communities are doing so in ways that defy the rules and flagrantly say "so what?" to practices institutionalized education systems would deem inappropriate. Letting kids make art with curse words, violence, and genuine expressions of fear or grief? Providing university students with experiences in civic engagement that force them to re-evaluate the fact they might've been raised in a bubble? Pardon me, but hell yes.

This isn't a PSA to be reckless or selfish, but really -- the adage of begging forgiveness vs. asking permission has some merit. Not just pushing for change -- but taking initiative and doing it -- resolutely, without apology, and even without approval can make change happen, even if you have to apologize for it later.

Addendum: This trip marked the 2/3rds point of the 21,549 mile trek. A word of advice to all: When you travel from Richmond to LA for a 5-day stay, don't get on a plane 5 days later and make the same trip for a different working meeting. Your body will hate you, and it will not be shy in letting you know.

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