Hampshire Needs A Story

Hampshire needs a story. A story that allows others to more easily comprehend what the Hampshire experience will be. It’s definitely not a mission statement. It’s not a list of buzz words on the level of collaboration or entrepreneurial. It’s not about feminist politics nor sustainable agriculture. It’s not a listing of what the best students are doing this year, though you might use some examples. It’s a story that explains what will happen, what good that will do you, and why you should care.

It should be easily tellable not convoluted or have complex sentence structure. You shouldn’t have to look down at a piece of paper to remember some important point or where you are in the story. While it’s not really an academic story it should explain our academic process while honestly reflecting what really happens, not just what we say happens. It should have warmth, insight and drama. It should be fun, open and believable. We should be proud to tell it and believe it ourselves.

It needs to be long enough to not feel rushed or have topics crammed in though there’s no need to mention every program or department and it definitely shouldn’t have any Hampshire jargon or acronyms. The story should be about people working together and the pleasures and problems we all have, how we approach those problems and how they are resolved. It should be about how we engage personal and social issues and how growth, personal and intellectual, occurs through experiences, actions and interactions.

It should honor the philosophy of the liberal arts, but from a modern view point. It should be about what happens in and outside of classes from the perspective of a student. It should describe and reveal the differences between the three divisional levels and what each experience feels like over time. It should illustrate the benefits of a division contract and it’s accompanying narrative evaluation for both faculty and students.

Finally, it should provide examples of what life after college could be like and some possibilities for living a meaningful life in the future.

Hampshire needs a story.

gunther    December 3, 2013

Thinking It Through Again

It’s time to come around again with a new re-evaluation of what we make and how we make it, or at least to notice all of those things. We tell stories: strange stories, normal stories, idealistic stories, real stories, feminist stories, ironic post-modern stories, common stories. We tell stories. It doesn’t matter how we put them together, just how people view them later. We’re never really judged by how we make them, just how good, or effective, they are as we watch them. So let’s think a little about the range of the forms of what we make.

There’s still images. It’s hard to tell a story with one photo, so we make a sequence. (How ironic this is. I’m the guy that loves to make posters in Pages. That’s one image to a page. Yes, maybe it’s not a story, but more of a statement. Hmm, I’ll have to think about that more.) How many? Who knows, maybe 10 is the magic number for a sequence – beginning, middle, end, with transitions, and a poignant moment or two, or three. We shoot stills, edit them down, sequence them and put them up on a wall, or in a book, on on a web site or make them into a slide show. It’s Photoshop images dropped into iPhoto, InDesign, iWeb, or Dreamweaver. It’s Keynote or Powerpoint (poor thing). It’s printing out books from iPhoto or Blurb.

Well, with a slide show we also have the option of adding sound and sometimes we do: real sounds, life, people talking, questions and answers, narration, music, sound effects, interviews, reflections, summations. It ends up as a slide presentation or a movie of slides and sounds. We make the audio in GarageBand, SoundTrack, Final Cut Pro, ProTools and drop it into iMovie, with the honestly really great Ken Burns effect of panning, scanning and zooming into and across the images. There’s the more formal Soundslides for a traditional journalism approach, or the sophisticated “key-framed” Final Cut Pro versions. While I love Keynote, it doesn’t do audio well at all, so it’s always silent (for me).

We’ve arrived at movies, made with stills, audio, film, and the stuff we shoot ourselves. It could be in iMovie, but mostly we’re in Final Cut Pro with excursions into Color, Motion, SoundTrack, and AfterEffects. iMovie is better than it was, but not as good as it should be and Final Cut, is, well it’s waiting to change and we’re waiting with it. It’s been a good friend, along with Premiere and Avid (both from long ago), but Final Cut has been there when we really needed it and it came through.

Then there’s sound alone, not lonely, but it can be if it wants to be. We can work for free in Audacity, or slightly free in GarageBand, almost in Logic, but it’s realistically just for music. SoundTrack is helpful, but mostly as a utility and finally ProTools is where we would all want to work in long form multitrack audio.

So that’s a broad range and long list of applications that help us with our work, some a little, some a lot. What I’m always looking for is a button in each of these applications that says “better story” and, no, it’s not really there, simply hoped for; just as there is no button on the piano that says “better music”. It’s all in the skills of the person playing that makes the piano turn out sounds that we love to hear. Alas, there’s no button in our software that gives us a better story. It’s us, thinking it up, working it out, thinking it through that makes the story better – hopefully. We’re the key. So what we need for ourselves is better skills, more experience, and a renewed understanding that we experience and understand the world through stories, not new software at all.

gunther

The Power Is In The Microphone and The Story

I've been watching the Susan Boyle video from the TV show "Britain's Got Talent". It's a fantastic seven minute roller-coaster ride than ends well. (New Link Here)  YouTube makes it easy to see this kind of thing, after the fact, so people link back and forth to it, though there are a lot of really bad versions out there, too truncated (you need to see the whole thing), bad audio, wrong aspect ratio. In fact the "official BGT" site on YouTube has the worst version of the performance – brutally edited down until it looses all of the tension. After watching a squished SD version, I finally found a full 16:9 version that looks and sounds good too. I was surprised by how choked up I was the first few times I watched it – it's quite emotional.

A few days later on BoingBoing I found this "Playing For Change" video that's a great music event, but doesn't have the full emotional impact of the other. The common thread is the power of a microphone, getting a great recording, and what mixing audio skillfully can produce.

On Wednesday I saw Hampshire student Will Bangs' Division III presentation. It was held in the Red Barn, a large rustic structure. He sat at a small table with a desk lamp, audio mixer, and microphone and just talked to the audience while he showed videos he and high school students he worked with had made projected onto a very small movie screen placed next to him. It was terriffic, but the microphone made all of the difference. If he had just sat there and talked to us – a crowd of over 50 people – it would have been a weak presentation. It was simple, but intimate because of the presentational power of amplification. Audio amplification is a lot like film lighting. It separates the subject from the background and draws our eye to what is meant to be seen or in this case heard. It was a lot like a "This American Life" show on stage. There were stories he just told as radio - voice only, then there were stories that were shown on the video projector and then he moved back and forth – each form playing off of the other.

The music video "Playing for Change" is a tour deforce of audio recording and mixing. It's subtle and builds and weaves instruments and voices as it progresses in complexity. It's one of the most restrained audio mixes I've heard. Think of all the audio they didn't use. The video part documents the making of it as much as showing the musicians and locations. You come to understand what's going on as it unfolds making it more enjoyable because of your growing understanding.

Susan Boyle, however, has a story behind it that adds more punch to the unfolding of events. It is a great recording and you can see fully how a microphone changes the sound of a voice from ordinary to extraordinary, but it's the context of the events that builds tension, surprise, irony, pleasure and hope. The performance by itself would be good, but not as uniquely memorable. However, what we are seeing is also heavily edited with the wisdom of hindsight and the power of a soundtrack that continues even after she's done singing. What we see has been arranged to bring out as much emotion as possible. It works. I wish all of my stories were as well told, succinct, and carried as much impact and warmth. Britain is a better place because it got to see Susan Boyle sing and I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more of her voice.

gunther