With more exciting news in our Resources category (such as the Prelinger Archives and Portraits of America posts this year), the Library of Congress has announced that the National Screening Room is now online and features extensive resources for media literacy education. Many items from this vital national archive are now accessible to the general public and classrooms across the country (and world). As noted in an article by CBS News, among its highlights are: the classic Edwin S. Porter short The Great Train Robbery (featured for study in Chapter 2), the 1953 feature The Hitch-Hiker by Ida Lupino (a prime director for study with Chapter 5), and a wide variety of diverse types of media such as advertisements, PSAs, and home movies that are discussed in such posts as What Exactly is that Movie? on mediateacher.net and in our investigations of motion picture language and screenwriting throughout Moving Images.
Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category
Prelinger Archives
Posted in Chapter 5, Resources, tagged Archival Footage, Open Culture, Prelinger Archives, Public Domain on May 5, 2018| Leave a Comment »
In the What Exactly is that Movie? post on mediateacher.net, you can read about tricky-to-categorize media messages that have evolved over the past 120 years or so. Recently, an extensive and very unique archive of very diverse movies was opened to the public: the Prelinger Archives. This incredible media archive is “a collection of over 60,000 ‘ephemeral’ (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films [which holds] approximately 11,000 digitized and videotape titles (all originally derived from film) and a large collection of home movies, amateur and industrial films acquired since 2002” (from Prelinger Archives “About” page). The media material here can provide a wide range of uses for the development of editing or vfx skills and as a treasure-trove of footage for use in original projects of all sorts. Here is an article about the archive from Open Culture, or you can go directly to the Prelinger Archives.
Resources for a New Semester, Part 6
Posted in Chapter 7, Resources on September 30, 2017| Leave a Comment »
There are many Crash Course videos from PBS Digital Studios, starting with one that builds on the Screenwriting Resources posts here at mediateacher.net: Screenplays. It reviews the standard basic “rules” seen in screenwriting manuals, although you will of course want to turn soon to Chapter 7 of Moving Images to dig in well and be inspired about the possibilities and standards in writing for moviemaking.
There are also pieces on the invention of the movie camera, sound, independent cinema, many on film history, and numerous others.
State of the Process 3: Arcane Cathodes
Posted in Chapter 2, Resources, tagged Cathode Ray Tube, Chi-Tien Lui, Jaime Joyce, Television, TV repair on December 31, 2016| Leave a Comment »
Wondering what to do with the old curved-screen TV in the corner of the cellar or the school’s repurposed A/V closet? Maybe it’s time for an art installation — although you may need the “arcane knowledge” (as NYTimes reporter Jaime Joyce puts it) of a TV repairman (well, at least one as masterful as Chi-Tien Lui).
