I am pleased to announce that the Communication Studies Unit is now equipped with a multimedia studio which I have set up with (a lot of) help from Avinash. The studio has been baptised Mediacom Studio and even has a website which we have launched yesterday at www.mediacomstudio.com
The facility has been created thanks to funding from the UNESCO-IPDC which approved my project last year. Avinash has been the mastermind behind the technical setup and has spent a lot of time selecting and fine-tuning our equipment list. We had a lot of constraints such as limited availability of certain items and also the dollar exchange rate which shrunk our budget. But, we managed to have a nice setup nevertheless with:
– Apple iMacs complete with the iLife and iWork suites
– Panasonic HD camcorders with tripods and a lighting kit
– Olympus audio recorders with tie-clip microphones
– Philips LCD TV, DVD player and an Apple TV
– a gigabit local network
The idea is to provide more hands-on practical training to our Communication and Journalism students, to give them the opportunity to come up with professional products and showcase them on the website.
Congrats!
Hope to watch the first mini-documentaries and podcasts on-line soon!!
It surely must have been an onerous exercise gear-hunting and juggling with the limited budget. But the end results are here!!
I suppose, for most students, getting the grips on iMovie ‘08 will be a lot easier/faster than learning to use Final Cut. Do you currently have training sessions on video-editing and techniques in the Communication Studies curricumlum?
Hi David,
Oddly some of your comments got caught in the Akismet Spam filter!
Anyway, yes it was a bit of a ‘casse-tete’ to do the gear-hunting. Thankfully Avinash helped a lot. In fact, he’s been the technical mastermind of the project.
And yes, we think that iMovie will be easier for students to use in the first place. We have also bought one licence for Final Cut Express for those who wish to use more advanced software.
And yes again, we do have video-editing and techniques in the curriculum. There’s a module called Audiovisual production and another for Journalism where students go to MCA and shoot images and edit with the help of MCA staff. I think they use Avid there…
Anyway, this studio will allow us to integrate audio and video production in more modules and to get students to produce more outputs and post online for people to see, comment and discuss.
Congrats Avinash and Christina 🙂
That’s really good news for comm guys up there. Uom really lacked such facilities. It’s a great start!
I guess over-zealous Akismet is working just a little ‘too’ well!! 🙂 Or am I blacklisted by Akismet as a very ‘prolific’ spammer?
Anyway, thanks Christina for replying my endless list of questions! I’m convinced your students will find great inspiration in using the iMacs together with iMovie+iDVD and Final Cut Express.
I would like to add one more thing. Avid may be the most popular choice in the industry, but still shooting and editing techniques are applicable irrespective of the tools used. In fact some sports and documentary TV channels in the US and even the BBC, have moved from expensive Avid systems to Final Cut solutions in the recent years, at only a fraction of the cost!
More impressive are independent movie makers at Sundance who have used Final Cut or even solely iMovie (“No Dumb Questions” and “Tarnation”) for editing their movies! Proves once more that the tools are no substitution to great ideas and talent…
Also, The Coen Brothers and Francis Copola are among the most famous Final Cut users.
Sorry for the multiple posts…would you mind deleting the redundant ones as I do sound like a broken record on the top of that, look like a dork now! (not that I’m not one, but still…;)
@ David,
Done, I’ve deleted the duplicate comments.
And yeah, you are absolutely right. Creativity is not correlated with the type of tool you use (though it helps to have some good ones at times).
As far as the students are concerned, they will most probably be fine with iMovie dixit Avi. Anyway, we are not expecting them to become prolific film-makers, rather we are supposed to help them become good communicators and reporters. If some of them turn out to be excellent directors, so much the better!
Hope they make good and efficient use of it