Welcome to Lecture 1 of E5.

My name is Ian Sexton.

Over here on my left is Dan Coffey.

We're going to be taking you through today's lecture.

And I'm going to start a little bit by talking about some

of the overarching goals of the course and how they

relate to storytelling more generally.

So if you are just joining us, we released

a short video called Lecture 0 that's available on the course website that

talks a little bit about some of the tools and technology

that we use in the course, whether that's some of the web

resources or the camera resources.

It's available here at exploringdigital.media.

And if you have any questions about the content in the lectures

or any of the content on the website, do email us

at staff@exploringdigital.media.

All right.

So what is this class about?

Our slug line for this is that it's a practical introductory course that

gives a fast-paced overview of a broad range of topics

related to contemporary media.

OK.

And we highlight this idea of practical and introductory.

We're going to talk about photography, video production, audio recording,

HTML, a little bit of JavaScript, which is--

any of those topics could be a course in themselves.

OK.

So we are going to broadly reach across and look

at all of these different tools and how we best might use them.

So if you're coming to this class with not a lot of experience

and you want to think about where you want to go in digital media production,

this is a great start.

If you're coming with a little bit of experience on one of these areas,

then you have time to investigate-- maybe you

have experience in photography, we can spend some time

investigating video production.

The practical component is that we're going to spend

a lot of time actually making work.

We'll take photographs.

We'll produce short videos.

We have a large final project for you guys to work on.

And so, one of the things that we do want to talk about

is how those tools relate to the ideas that you want to express.

Because at the end of the day, a camera, when you're taking pictures,

is just a dumb box.

It needs a very smart operator in order to help it do the things that you

want to express yourself more fully.

All right.

All of the decisions that you make from a technical and a logistical standpoint

either support or detract from the idea that you're trying to express.

This is going to be a foundational idea across everything we discuss.

That media production in itself is a series of trade-offs.

Choices can range from visual and compositional choices--

where I place the camera, what exposure I used to make my image--

or they can be logistical and workflow.

I only have a budget of $10.

Well, that's going to limit the kind of camera

that I can use for this assignment.

Just as a simple expression.

Our intentions and our required deliverables--

what we're hoping to achieve--

will define the options that are available to us.

At the end of the day, we should be proactive decision makers

who manage visual and narrative choices to support our goals.

That's where we want to get to.

And as I said, every decision is a trade-off,

and your choices either support or detract from your intentions.

So at the end of the day, we need to understand

what we want to say so that we can choose

the right technical expression and the right logistical expression

to say that in a way that matters to the people who are listening.

So your trade-offs, generally-- and I think

you may have all seen this before, where you can have either speed, cost,

or quality.

You can have two of them, but you can't have all of them.

It's the normal maximum for this.

And so if we think about this as, in the sense of media production,

if we have cost and speed--

it doesn't cost us a lot and it's very fast-- you could maybe think of a point

and shoot camera.

You can get them for very cheap.

They're mostly auto.

They produce jpgs which can be instantly posted to the web,

or perhaps even your phone.

You take a picture and it can go right to Instagram.

It ends up not costing a lot.

But it also has limited controls.

The image that it makes, it's not easy to adjust aperture or change

the way it looks.

It takes one kind of picture all the time.

And at the same time, it also takes very small pictures.

They're designed to be posted on the web.

So you sacrifice some quality for ease of use, speed, and cost.

Whereas if we have high quality and high speed,

then we end up in this place where it ends up costing a lot.

And I think a good analogy for this is maybe feature filmmaking, where

the budgets are millions of dollars, but they're

able to produce an incredible amount of content

in a fairly short period of time.

And that's because they have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people

working for 30 days.

You can make a feature-length movie and shoot it

and do a production in about 30 days, where

you have hundreds of people on set.

That costs a lot of money.

And to finish this, if you have low cost and high quality,

it's going to end up taking a long time.

So it could be that you have to download gigabytes and gigabytes of footage,

as you will for this next assignment.

And that's going to take time.

Three gigabytes.

Right.

It's not that much.

All right.

The trade-offs are not just the idea of logistical trade-offs, which is

this cost versus quality versus speed.

But also that every decision in making an image actually

affects the visual artifacts or the oral artifacts that

are present in your finished piece.

So your technical choices in acquisition matter.

The technical choices in processing matter to your end deliverable result.

And so, as we go through the course, when we talk about photography, when

we talk about video, we talk about audio recording in HTML,

we are going to frame it through this idea

that the visual choices are made in advance.

That you're thinking consciously about--

I want my image to look this way versus this way.

And I think a simple example is actually this image here, which

I think is credit to you, right, Dan?

DAN COFFEY: Yes.

IAN SEXTON: Yes, so this is an image of a dam.

You can see that the water is suspended.

That time has stopped.

It's really, really not-- you can't really

tell what's going on in the background.

But if we look at it another way, this is a different capture.

It's the same frame.

It's the same image.

But it looks completely different.

The water now has this streaky fluid approach.

You can see the background of the lake.

And all this is to represent that there are many different ways

to capture an image.

And each one of them presents us with a different look.

So why might you choose one over the other?

And again, it's this idea of supporting your story.

Oops, went backwards.

Sorry.

So for this image, maybe we are talking about time

and the instance of a moment.

It was at this moment.

And so we want to freeze time.

And maybe for this image, it's more about the quality

of the environment and the space.

When you sit next to a babbling brook, which is this-- not quite what this is,

it's a weird dam, but you get the idea.

DAN COFFEY: Two very different [INAUDIBLE]..

IAN SEXTON: Exactly.

Exactly.

OK.

So intention in storytelling.

How do we use and how do we understand the story and what

we want to say so that when we are confronted

with these technical choices, we can make smart visual decisions?

For this lecture, I'm going to focus on narrative cinema,

in part because narrative cinema is the most freely defined.

It's not really constrained by marketing clients or educational video

or things like that.

And also, our assignment for week one is actually

going to be focused on building a scene out of narrative footage

that we will provide for you.

We'll use this as a scaffold for that assignment.

But that is not to say that these concepts don't apply to other modes

and genres of media production.

If you're doing a photo essay, that essay, in there is your story.

If you're doing a marketing video, you have

some brand that you want to sell to people,

and that brand can be your story.

So again, even if it's not a giant traditional narrative story,

there is this thread of intention that should follow through all of your work.

All right.

So to dive right in, what's the difference between story and plot?

Does anyone here have an idea?

What's a story?

Yes.

AUDIENCE: So the story has character.

It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

IAN SEXTON: OK.

So there's characters, and they go from the beginning to middle

and the end, which suggests this time and this transformation.

So the story is the telling of them moving from the beginning position

to the end position.

OK.

I think that's really good.

So a story is an unfolding of events.

That's a really good crystallization of that.

Is that different than plot?

And if so, how is it different?

Does anyone have a sense of why they might be different?

All right.

So plot is the unfolding of events, which is essentially a story,

but with an understanding of why it's happening.

OK.

And this is really succinctly put by a quote

from EM Forrester, which is, the story is the king died,

and then the queen died, which is the narrative events that unfolded.

The plot is that the king died, and then the queen died of grief.

It gives motivations to her actions and, or the situation.

All right.

Part of what we're talking about when we're talking about story

is not just understanding the actions that are occurring on screen,

but the larger why.

The subtext of the whole story.

All right.

Plot ends up being the motivated actions of characters in a believable world.

All right.

And this is important because if your audience does not

believe that your character would do something,

no one will believe your story.

This doesn't mean that a believable world needs to be the mundane 9 to 5

that we exist in.

Fantastical elements or exaggerations can exist.

But the relationships of the characters and the ramifications in the world

need to make sense.

That helps out the audience with this willful suspension of disbelief.

I'm willing to believe in flying cars.

If there is a scientist who invented them, and someone has to drive them,

and there's some sort of relationship that

exists between the characters and the objects that exist in that world.

All right.

OK.

So a lot of how we're talking about story

revolves around this idea of characters.

We said that there was this narration of events from a beginning

to a middle to an end.

But one of the things that you also said was