Category Archives: Video

We Are Makers premiere

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After several months of work with Nathan Driskell and Mathew Bardwell in the Learning Studio, our first short documentary premiered this last week. We Are Makers is an introduction to the workshops and people behind the Maker Movement.

It started as a series of conversations at ACU around what a makerspace would bring to undergraduate programs on campus and really sparked a lot of energy that led to a full-blown film project. We enjoyed really generous interviews with Dale Dougherty from Make Magazine along with folks from Etsy, School of Visual Arts, and the New York Hall of Science, among others.

We were delighted when the New Media Consortium gave us a slot at the summer conference in Hilton Head to premiere the film. James Langford joined me for a presentation after the screening that kicked off a great conversation that spilled out into the hallways. Just a great opportunity to begin sharing the film more broadly.

ABSTRACT:  The advent of 3D printing and the $40 micro-controller has sparked a renewed interest in Making and desktop fabrication. Teachers, librarians, and museum educators are taking a closer look at the DIY, hacking spirit behind the Maker movement and are asking how it might complement their use of problembased or challenge-based programs. The presenters will share work on a short feature produced by the AT&T Learning Studio at ACU that shaped campus consensus about the Maker movement, as well as a vision for its impact in K-20 education.

Studio hits the mountain

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Just a quick update on a project I produced for my dad. In 1975, he and Cleddy Varner began teaching the Beginning Snowskiing class at ACU. I was on that first trip, not yet old enough to have my own poles (a source of some consternation at the time).

As the 40th anniversary of this particular class approaches, and as I’ve been able to share the mountain at Red River, NM, with my own son, I was just looking for a way to somehow connect the two experiences. My son Colin and my father Curt joined me for numerous rides up the chairlift, but on a couple of those I brought a Zoom digital audio recorder along.

The video was all shot on a Canon 5D mkII. It was my first time shooting with an ND Fader filter to help limit just how much of the unseasonably sunny day came into the lens, a great boon to shooting snowy scenes but a bear to focus reliably without a monitor.

Visual Storytelling experiments

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Over the last couple years I’ve enjoyed reconnecting with photography through our work with Nil Santana. Together we’ve led a number of workshops with beginning and intermediate faculty photographers, shooting on high-dollar cameras and smartphones. Over and over again we’ve heard colleagues reflect on the way attending to the changing light, movement, color, and basic compositional elements provides a more personal reminder to be fully present in each moment.

After seeing hundreds and hundreds of photos taken within a several square block area of the Texas hill country, you’d think you would have exhausted the possibility of the camera to show you something new or surprising. I think you’ll see in the work of faculty from these workshops just how various even a single street corner or building can be when we bring our own lens to it.

Digital Academy blog

One personal challenge over the last year has been to begin to connect this desire to see each moment more clearly with the remarkable potential of DSLR cameras now to capture high-definition video. The following pieces started as technical experiments with a new camera or editing software and turned into something I was surprised to be quite proud of. Enjoy.