Last Year on this blog we began by developing a magazine and learning how to target and communicate to audiences using print media. That was our first step to understanding media production.
Currently make shift media studies are changing gears. Rather than focusing on reading and magazines, we are now analyzing film and television. We get to explore documentaries and fictional series and analyze how different form and techniques are used to tell the same story.
I have so far:
Analyzed the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) in comparison with the Hulu fiction series The Dropout (2022) and discussed the different presentations of the same events, focusing on the contrast between documentary and fictional approaches, specifically within the context of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.
I translated the first 5 minutes of The Inventor into storyboards, identifying critical shots, camera work, sound, and editing to analyze the ways meaning is constructed.
As before, we’ll continue expanding on these tasks, as we did last year when we built a full magazine portfolio. The difference is that it is now more about the moving images, the sound, the coded images, and how stories change when crossing the borders of documentary and drama.
This blog will document my assignments over the course of the year, just as last year, but with a new angle.