thestoryofjory.com

Several weeks ago, Stan announced that he would be recording a new song he wrote for Eskimo Joe’s 35th anniversary.  The song is called “All Roads Lead to Joe’s” and it’s actually quite catchy.  You can listen and download it for free at www.eskimojoes.com/music.

Now, everyone I’ve mentioned this to gives me a puzzled look, but let me assure you that Stan can actually sing.  We actually karaoke’d together a few weeks ago, and  years ago he had a rhythm & blues band that even released an album.  In 1986, Stan and his band recorded a music video for newly minted MTV, right there at Eskimo Joe’s.  So, this is not a new thing for Stan, although he (and by proxy, Joe’s) hasn’t done in a while.

Today, for the first time in 24 years, we’re shooting part one of a music video for Stan’s new song.  As the director/producer of this operation, I’m more than a little psyched about this shoot.  Today’s objective is to film the live performance aspect of the video at Eskimo Joe’s – something that is challenging enough on its own – but they’ve only given me an hour to get it done!  The production schedule is brutally tight all day, actually.  We’re only shooting for the “All Roads”video from 7-8 p.m., but we’re also shooting the Bart Crow Band concert this evening as well.  And we’re doing all this with a crew of three.

Although I know there’s no way to control the schedule, I’m very confident that we’re going to get some great footage.  Gideon Thompson and Melinda Spurlin, the other two members of the crew, are very talented and capable camera persons.  We’ll have use of a jib as well, thanks to Marc Krein.  With these resources, I have no doubt that we’ll put out a finished product with very high production values.

Next week, I’ll post a recap of how it all went.  In the meantime, if you’re in Stillwater today and want to be in a music video, come see me at Eskimo Joe’s!

Some of my friends and family have been asking what exactly my thesis was about.  To answer that question, I’m posting the abstract I wrote for my paper.  An abstract is simply a 100-150 word summary of a research paper, designed to help other people get a quick understanding of what the research found and whether it is useful for their own research studies.

Burson, J. K. (2010). Measuring media literacy among collegiate journalism students. Proquest Thesis & Disstertations. p. 98.

Scope and Method of Study: The purpose of this study was to measure and compare media literacy knowledge structure scores and attitudes among collegiate journalism students with those of non-journalism students.  The study utilized quantitative data analysis.  Data were collected using an online survey as well as convenience sampling methods.

Findings and Conclusions:  The study found that collegiate journalism students scored higher on the media literacy survey than non-journalism students, but that overall media literacy knowledge among the sample was low. Scores and attitudes of journalism students and students in journalism-related majors were also compared.  The findings suggest that journalism majors may use the media for more specific purposes than students in other majors.  A potential third-person effect was identified among journalism students when comparing scores on the media literacy survey with attitudes about media literacy.  Potter’s (2004) cognitive theory of media literacy was utilized to provide explanation of the findings.

I heard it takes awhile for papers to officially be published, so a few months from now Proquest should have my paper available online through your local library.  If you want a copy in the meantime (yeah, right!) just email me!

I’m looking forward to purchasing Adobe’s CS5 Master Suite sometime around September.  It’s a big purchase, but with a faculty/education discount I’ll finally be able to have a few programs I need and several that I want, all for a third of the cost.  I’ve been using open-source versions of some of these products for several years now, and it’s time to graduate.

To be clear though, I disagree with anyone claiming that commercial software products like Adobe’s are the only way to go.  Although commercial software often has more advanced features than their open-source or freeware counterparts, the reality is that most people are only using basic parts of these programs and thus have paid for lots of features they’ll never use.  If you only need to cut objects out of images or adjust color levels, why pay for Photoshop CS5 when Gimpshop works just as well?

I’d like to pay tribute to some of the free software programs I’ve used to complete projects over the years.  Even though I’m upgrading to commercial software for some of their uses, I’ll probably still use many of them, and of course recommend them to friends.  Hope this is useful to you!

Audacity. It’s a great little digital audio editor.  It has a simple & straightforward interface, which means there really isn’t much of a learning curve.  I have a hard time seeing it as a complete solution for audio editing, though.  I’ve just used it to edit voiceovers and such because I really prefer the more advanced features of Pro-Tools and Soundtrack Pro (commercial products) for editing music and sound effects.

Blender. Warning – do not install this program unless you don’t mind looking up and realizing you’ve just spent three days straight animating a snowman.  That’s exactly what happened when I downloaded Blender, a 3D modeling and animation program.  It taught me a lot about using three dimensions of space, which has come in handy with other visual effects programs like Motion 4.

Celtx. I actually just started using this program, and all I can say is WOW. For storyboarding and project organization, I can’t imagine anything better.  It works for several types of projects – scriptwriting, comics, novels, commercial/broadcast shoots – you name it.  After just 2 weeks, I’m a big fan.

Gimpshop. I’ve blogged about Gimpshop in bits and pieces before, so it’s well-documented where I stand with this product.  We’ve had our problems, Gimp and I, but that’s not going to keep me from recommending it to my students next year when they complain about not having Photoshop on their home computers.

Handbrake. This snappy little program is a go-to for me when I have to do some quick converting, particularly if I’m ripping video out of a .VOB container.  Plus, I love that the program instructs me to “put down that cocktail” when my file’s ready!

Inkscape. Gimpshop is to Photoshop as Inkscape is to Illustrator.  For basic creation and manipulation of vector images, look no further than Inkscape. I’ve never used it with a drawing tablet or for anything fancy, but I’ve laid out some invites and the like using this program and I found it relatively easy to use once I got the hang of it.

Kino. Truthfully, I only used this program a few times because I had access to better NLE systems at school.  But I thought Kino worked just fine for editing digital video; and in fact reminded me of the old iMovie interface.  Sometimes, you can’t beat simple & easy. But the bad news is that it only runs on Linux.

MacTheRipper. This program rips DVDs straight from the drive, which makes it ideal for ripping several movie chapters or the whole movie.  I like that there are several settings you can manipulate to decrease the file size, or just grab a few scenes from an authored DVD instead of having to rip the whole thing.  Hooray for space-saving!

MythTV. Forget paying your cable company for DVR – if you have a spare computer lying around, use MythTV! When Tanner set up our Mac Mini to work as our MythTV box, we could record television shows, pause and rewind live TV, and even save shows to the server.  We used it a lot until Tanner needed the Mac Mini for some other project and we got a Netflix streaming disc.  I still think it’s a sweet little program.

Soundslides. Great for turning your photos into a video with music.  Prior to finding Soundslides, I used Quicktime Pro for this.  Soundslides is actually easier to use for this purpose than Quicktime Pro, and it allows for more precision.

VLC. I’m trying, but I still don’t fully understand certain codecs and how they work.  That’s why VLC is a little like magic to me.  VLC seems to be able to open any file, regardless of format or codec.  VLC isn’t my default media player, but I definitely use VLC a lot for troubleshooting file & codec problems.  It seems that if VLC can’t open it, nothing can.