INTRODUCTIONS

Welcome to “Introduction to Multimedia Composition: Cinema Appreciation in the Digital Age.” This will be our course website. You’ll find the syllabus in the menu above (or at this link).

In order to share your work, you’ll have to sign on to Google using your scarletmail.rutgers.edu email address. You can find more info about the Google/Scarletmail collaboration here. After today’s class, please send me an email from your Scarletmail account to bmanuel@scarletmail.rutgers.edu.

The main purpose of the course, as outlined in the syllabus: “Students will engage critically in the process of creative expression“). That is to say, we’ll spend the semester working on multimedia compositions and examining how/why we might compose this way.

The topic of this course is going to be “Cinema in the Digital Age” and we will be focusing on the various forms of the “Video Essay.”

In many ways, what we will be asking is what Kevin B. Lee asks in this video: “What Makes a Video Essay Great?” (You can read more about Lee’s thoughts on this issue here).

Blogging & Keeping track of your work

You will be creating your own WordPress sites to use throughout the semester. If you want more guidance and/or want to play around with more of the basics, I suggest you peruse these sites:

• Getting started: http://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-started/+ http://learn.wordpress.com/
• WordPress Lessons: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons

Blog Assignment (Due Jan 27th 5pm):
Set up a WordPress blog: make sure to include an About Me page (or widget). [We’ll work on that next week]. While you can name your blog anything you want, be sure to choose a title appropriate for the class and be wary of the type of personal information you want to publish on the web.