Seminar Notes: 2.15.08

Attendance: Tory, Brian, Pete, Mollie, Jeremy, Maria, Professor Forester [Eric is at the All-Ivy Environmental Fair]
Show and Tell:

• Melloweb: creates multimedia educational documentaries
  • http://melloweb.com
  • click on video to see his multimedia videos
  • the photographer shoots “up” at the interviewee; reverence?
  • What is Flash design? [click on multimedia under the heading "Melloweb"]
• Urban Exposure: street and documentary photography
  • http://urban-exposure.com/
  • Why are these photographs interesting? What makes them interesting?
  • [we looked at Urban Decay project]
• Photosynth: open-source photo libraries and attach geographical informtaion to the material; creates environment
  • http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
• TED: inspired talks by the words greatest thinkers and doers
  • http://www.ted.com/index.php/ : [search: photosynth]
  • Instead of having an image, they can composite an entire network over the web; you can continually focus in on the details of a photograph using everybody’s photos (open source photo network); make a model of the entire earth, grows in complexity as people use it
• University of Virginia: multimedia for their online magazine
  • http://www.uvamagazine.org/site/c.esJNK1PIJrH/b.3508781/

Tools

• Transom.org
  • Transom.org/Tools for general multimedia tools information
• Audacity: Mac/PC, freeware; all you need is a mic and a computer; play around with it but it’s pretty easy to use to edit sound files after interviews
• Garage Band: Mac [we took a look at this]
• How to put together the audio with a picture or documentary? (hopefully we’ll be looking at this next week)

Projects

• Tory would like to work with documentaries: interviewing people about their work and their neighborhood
• Mollie would also like to do something within the community
  • Professor Forester: there might be some opportunity to document meetings in Ithaca
• Jeremy would like to look at the EcoVillage and learn more about that
  • The Sustainability Coordinator at Cornell lives in the EcoVillage; maybe invite him (Dan) to talk to us and identify four or five people that are doing things around campus to make things more “sustainable”
  • Mollie is a member of the Sustainability Hub and could get student input
  • Maria has a professor (Elliott) who has a lot of experience working with sustainability issues (maybe she could do an interview)
• Brian would like to learn how to use Flash design (Pete is also interested in Flash)
  • Maybe we can get a demo of Flash [there is a large computer lab with Flash capabilities in the Art Dept., ask Greg Halpern if we could get a demo]
• Maria is interested in everything
• Mollie: maybe we could make something for younger kids? For education purposes?

For next week: brainstorm organizations we know, projects we might take