Friday, May 20, 2011

Picturing America

The past year or so we've been happily and proudly associated with the NEH and PBS' Picturing America (On Screen) initiative.


The program is expansive -crossing schools, libraries, websites and ultimately broadcast media. We did the title sequence for the broadcast and made a few of the short subjects.

In trying to finish up the last one, we hit a bit of a snag. So I revisited the NEH website for insight and found this. The body of the segment is downloadable, this is the only version I could find embeddable (which, incidentally, is a spell check approved word whereas "downloadable" is not).



The first :45 seconds or so are a kind-of intolerable opening. Skip passed them to body of the clip. The students reactions after the NEH promo ends are also interesting.

As mentioned, there was a hiccup with this last piece we're doing. Watching this little video helped remind of the goals of the initiative. I had been thinking a lot about the "ways of seeing" and "observing" aspects -the former hasn't been well addressed in the other episodes -but was reminded of the resulting rewards of seeing and observing: illuminating stories of the past.

Hopefully this shift in thought will help wrap up the last subject and turn it into a good little film.

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