Individual Media Project Reflection: HORROR

14Apr10

Storytelling is the keyword for the way I want to teach my future classes. Structuring a class’s unit plans around the ways in which stories are told means flexibility: sometimes units will be thematically based, other times they will be issue based, and still there will be times when units could be genre based. Structuring a class in this way allows students to make connections about the ways in which stories are told, and help them pick out reoccurring plots and archetypes.

I decided long ago that a fun and exciting unit to teach would be on the genre of horror, as it is a rich genre when times is taken to engage the text. There is plenty of good literature in the horror genre that is already taught in school: The works Edger Allen Poe, The Lottery, The Birds, The Turn of The Screw, (some examples bleed over into science fiction, which would make for a nice discussion) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein are a few of the more popular ones.

The video I created in intended to be an introduction to horror as a genre, hopefully putting everyone in the class on the same page with some of the more important vocabulary and conventions: mood and intention, horror versus terror, the four typical conflict types and most frequently seen subgenres. With the introduction of these elements and vocabulary out of the way, as the teacher, I can spend more time discussing cultural context around the works the class is studying, which with horror, is a major factor in interrupting a piece.

I would like to continue to make these introductory videos for different genres, themes and issues I might teach, specifically I would like to make videos for dystopian literature, naturalism (referenced in the horror video) and one for transcendentalism.

I was really surprised by the amount of work involved in making the video. I think the research and the scrip writing took up a great deal of time, and sadly I had to cut almost a page out of my original scrip for time issues. It was the powerpoint, however, that took the most time. Looking back, I would like to have added more pictures into the powerpoint to keep it from being so text heavy, but I think considering the purpose of the video, it needs to be text heavy to communicate all the information clearly. Working with Audacity was not a fun task; in fact, I gave up on the program because the new versions add in a voice tag when exporting to mp3 format. I did find out later that if you open your voice file in the sound recorder for windows, you can chop off that voice tag. The most frustrating part of the video process was making the individual slides match up with cues in the recording – needless to say, I found some interesting ways to make my sound and video timing match up. This project, while fun and rewarding, has likely involved more hours than any other project I have done in college – this video is at least twenty house worth of work.

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