2MM ~ Swim Team

A Tale of Two Retail Spaces

Module 3 ~ Architecture & Interior Design

Imaginative bridge between the work of art of Architecture & Interior Design and the work of art of Teaching…

My imaginary bridge this week was sparked by the uneasy confrontation I experienced while collecting pictures for our Architecture & Interior Design project.  I do understand that stores pay money to have people develop their displays, and I'm sure they have their share of people grabbing pictures of impressive displays and recreating them without paying.  However, this week, it was the store without bells and whistles and impressive displays that gave me grief about taking pictures.  The completely impressive store, with beyond amazing displays, allowed me to walk around for hours (without saying a word to me) allowing me a world of photo opportunities.  After looking at all the shots I collected of both stores, it was clear that one store was very proud and confident in what I would see; the other... not so much.  

As the week progressed, it made me think about teaching and how it relates to the interior design of my two stores.  The attributes of my first store are attributes I wouldn’t want to see in a teacher.  Quantity over quality, no improvements even though it is painfully obvious the need is there, and wouldn’t be thrilled with a Principal or school official observing in the classroom just as you wouldn’t want someone taking pictures in your store.  The qualities of the impressive store are the same as the qualities a good teacher would have.  They understand there is a place for tradition, but there is also a place for new ways, new ideas, new systems, and new approaches.  That store was proud to have me taking pictures and confident in what I would see ~ Just as a teacher with those qualities, someone who is taking the time to create a special experience, an engaging journey, would be happy to have someone observe them… taking mental pictures or otherwise!

Module 3 ~ Architecture & Interior Design

Imaginative bridge between the work of art of Architecture & Interior Design and the work of art of Teaching…


I believe Architecture and Interior Design play a role in teaching in that a school’s physical design can improve or worsen children’s academic performance. The example I would like to share has to do with my search for a school for my children. After narrowing it down to a choice of two, the deciding factor was based on the buildings themselves. School ’A’ was very dungeon like. The elementary section was allocated to the basement of an extremely old building, where the ceilings/walls had deteriorations, no windows, low lights, and narrow hallways. In this situation, I could only imagine that my productivity would be low, and I couldn’t imagine it would be any different for my children. It was a depressing atmosphere, and didn’t matter to me how academically appealing the school was. All I could think about was seven hours a day (x) five days a week (x) ¾ of the year was too much time to spend in such gloomy conditions.

In stark contrast, School ‘B’, the school I chose, has a wall of windows in every classroom allowing natural light to seep in, a glass wall in the library, wide open corridors, masses of light throughout the entire school! It was with great pleasure that I could send my children to school in surroundings that promote an airy, cheerful atmosphere. I have to believe the quality of their surroundings has an influence on their academic performance.
　

　

　

　

　

　

Forgotten Souls ~ 2 Minute Moment ~ Revised

Building an imaginative bridge between the work of art of film & television, and the work of art of teaching…

Both Filmmaking and Teaching are interactive...

Just as s a filmmaker must know where to begin the story, as Groh states that she discovered that the story shouldn't begin at the chronological beginning, you have to figure out what the audience cares about, a teacher must know where lessons should begin, what the class cares about in terms of what they need to know to build on their current knowledge of a subject.  As Larry Prusak said, it's not like the Monty Python approach to learning, where you open up someone's head, and you pour the information in.  You're waiting for he/she to respond, to come back.  Because the sooner the audience/class responds, whether it's hundreds of people watching a video at the same time (or a class of 30 students), or speaking to an individual, the sooner the audience/class experiences the story and really feels something, the better the story/lesson is.  That's the objective for both filmmakers and teachers:  to have the person really experience something, and retain the information conveyed via the experience.  

Compelling Video and Director's Commentary

Director’s Commentary

The “experience”…

The experience I was trying to create with my multimedia project is a strong sense of hectic chaos and suspense.  Five days a week, this is my world of frantic craziness, and it is always a suspenseful game of beat the clock as inevitably one of the kids doesn’t cooperate, little things happen along the way, and we are rushing. Actually, on the day I shot this video, as soon as we got in the car, there was a fight between two of the boys. I didn’t leave that footage in, as it wasn’t as compelling as it was annoying! 

In terms of using something from this module that we learned about to create the kind of experience I was going for, I chose to create tension as discussed in Percussive Editing by inserting clocks that I had shot after the fact. The example they used in the reading was from the movie High Noon. I was able to play on the audience’s sense of time elapsing against the specified deadline of 7:50 a.m. By doing this, the anticipation of the dreaded events were heightened by the introduction of periodic cuts to the clock showing the time getting closer and closer to 7:50 a.m.

The things I worked on to create my experience…

To begin with, I shot a video of getting my four kids ready for school and out the door.  Later that afternoon, I shot all the clocks we typically glance at to gage our progress getting ready.  I changed the times on the clocks to reflect the timeframes of our mornings, and shot in five-minute increments not knowing how many clocks I would use in my video.  Once I had all the video, I was able to begin creating my experience. I did not warn the children ahead of time that I would be shooting them getting ready for school as I wanted them to act as naturally as possible when I woke them. 

Additionally, I manipulated the following:

v     Arranging scenes in an order that made sense

v    Adding “Breakheat” musical jingle from iMovie as my footage on its own was boring

v    Adding overlapping graphics in the beginning to help set up the story

v    Since the original footage consisted of 10 minutes and 25 seconds without the clocks, I had to do some serious cutting.

v    After retaining the best clips and putting them together, I did clip adjustments to speed up the video from 100% to 800%. This change, I felt, added to the chaotic feeling.

v    I went into sound effects and overlaid the school bell sound at the end of the video.

v     I also added overlap graphics at the end in case it was unclear what Mandy said when we arrived at her school.  She knew we were rushing, and she ran down the hall and screamed, “I win!!” when she reached the end.  It was a total impromptu reaction and I left the sound in on that one clip because it said it all.  I also timed the bell sound so that she beat the bell (there isn’t really a bell that rings in her school).

v    I chose to darken the clock shots as they were all shot later in the afternoon when it was pretty bright in the house (which wasn’t consistent with how dark it was when the kids were actually getting up to go to school).

v    Audio adjustments were made to fade out at the end of the movie and also to remove all audio from all the clips except the last one. Audio adjustments were also made to the clock footage, as there was too much background noise with those.

v    When I shot the video, I did a lot of long tracking shots that were meant to go well with speed as I was planning on speeding up the video in an effort to make it chaotic.

v    I brightened the clock at 7:40 so it flickers right on beat with the suspense sound effect one time at the end.

v    I added suspenseful sound effects over the clocks to give it a greater feeling of suspense.

Evaluation of how the experience turned out, and lessons learned about NDCE…

In my opinion, the overall video turned out quite well. I felt that by speeding it up, it gave it a great pace and energy and was successful creating suspense with the clock. The music matched the pace of the visuals very well. I think it does a great job conveying the daily frantic experience of getting kids out the door, but in the end I found it to be more 'funny' in terms of how it made me feel… and humor wasn’t really what I was going for.  It is hard for me to be objective when answering the question as to whether or not my project gave the sense of chaos and suspense; after viewing it so many times, I’m too close to it. I would have liked to increase the tension by having the clocks show more frequently toward the end, but it would have been difficult to keep the video "around a minute" in length.  In the end, I do think the video supplies the most important storytelling element in that it has a humorous, happy "Emotional Punchline".   

The lesson I learned about the nature and design of compelling experiences is that there is so much more involved in creating a compelling experience than just the video, it is more a collaborative effort of people manipulating forms to create the compelling experience. The person editing the footage shot has endless power to manipulate the forms (i.e., pace, light, music, sound effects, graphics, etc.) and can change the whole meaning of the any shots given to them.