For a semester now, I’ve pointed my multimedia introduction students towards a bunch of good multimedia sites and asked to find and share in class something that they’ve really liked. It’s good for them because they have to look at multimedia in a critical way. It’s good for me because I find neat new things I haven’t come across before.
“Highrise,” from the Canada’s National Film Board, is an interesting way to present what is essentially a feature length documentary about “vertical suburbs” in a non linear way. Lots of opportunity for exploration here, lots of stills and animation. It’s so big that I haven’t had a chance to fully explore it.
“Threat Theater,” from the Washington Post, is a nice little video about “threat assessment instructor,” a man who trains personal protects to identify and deal with threats. He does this by acting out the roles. No B-roll to speak of, but interesting and well edited.
As always there were several from MediaStorm, including “Driftless: Stories from Iowa,” “The Marlboro Marine” and “The Ninth Floor.” All good, photo-driven multimedia pieces. It must be the heft that so impresses students.
Several students selected part from The New York Times‘ “One in Eight Million” series. Each piece tells the story of a single New Yorker. The favorite was The Ladies’ Man, but I love how each story is introduced with a great audio clip from the subject.