Public Service Announcements or PSA’s are generally speaking advertisements whose task is to promote a certain agenda for the sake of public health or benefit. Sponsored either by the government or non-for-profits, these short videos are sometimes laughable for the directness of their message. In addition to what they reveal regarding cultural priorities and assumptions, they also raise the question of how best to get a message across through images.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W9WDZwDo-w&hl=en&fs=1]

John Berger’s BBC broadcast series 1972 BBC series “Ways of Seeing,” spawned the similarly titled book. What Berger gives us in this series and book is a history of Art that is informed by the theories of Walter Benjamin, namely his thoughts on the implications of modern image making. Of particular note, is his emphasis on selective framings and the viewer’s perspective. He shows how these constructions can be used to read contemporary advertising imagery with an eye toward both meaning and affect. A few of the seven essays that comprise the book are just a series of images. This use of images to comment on one another recently predates the internet and recent image blogs such as “tumblr.” The reframing of the image, the very decision to linger on it, transforms it’s significance, making it’s original meaning all the more clear.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnfB-pUm3eI&hl=en&fs=1]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWA7uevo_Q&hl=en&fs=1]

Hopefully, you’ll remember this troubled look of the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin and that he was responsible for the oft-cited 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The full text is available online here(edit link fixed). In it, Benjamin chronicles both the loss of aura or singularity involved in mechanical reproduction and discovers in this loss a democratizing liberation of the image from classical models of representation.

16×9 is the aspect ratio of widescreen tv’s, hd video, and increasingly the aspect ratio of online video. Importantly, this ratio can exist is an whole variety of resolutions. In other words, 1920×1080, 1280×720, and 640×360 are all the same 16×9 aspect ratio. For your first project you will be rendering a 640×360 video, a size that is both easily posted online and easy to render.

And to help you with your projects I have uploaded a .blend file that has the final output settings for the project. You can start your project with this file or copy over the settings to your .blend file. Again the final output is to be a 640×360 .flv video with mp3 audio. The example .blend is 1500 frames or one minute in length.

Also here is a blank 1280×720 px image that you can use as a starting point in photoshop.

Archaeology is most generally speaking the study of material culture as a means to the anthropological end of developing a better understanding of humanity. We might first envision the archaeologist sifting through layers of sediment looking for bones and other such traces; but not all material is buried underground. In the era of youtube, flickr, and high speed internet access, material culture or rather media culture presents itself hidden amidst new kinds of layers.

To get at the media culture of the past we must sift through distractions and attractions, ignoring one thing so that we may focus on another. This can be difficult given the constant streams of news, gossip, and user generated content. This content lures us with the potential of the new and is so doing adds a layer of distraction between us and the media culture of another era.

Here I want to introduce the radio program/podcast called This American Life. In it, the host Ira Glass and other reporters do an excellent job of exploring a theme or idea by interviewing people. Their production techniques, including source audio and music are a good example of creative story telling.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbVeN13wGFc&hl=en&fs=1]
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/
and a link to it’s youtube site, http://www.youtube.com/talwithiraglass
and another youtube clip of Ira talking about storytelling.

Also archive.org is, as the name suggests, an archive of audio and visual material online. It’s a good resource for material that is legal to use for your own productions.
http://www.archive.org/

Here are a couple of helpful online blender communities. First the Chinese language blender community

and then the Blender Artists forum, the largest English language community,