E 309M Computers and Writing

Project 3, Task 4

You'll have to begin working in earnest on the draft of the third project. Note that you will need to have the draft finished by the end of this week, that's friday the third of November.

You can also expand your options for addressing the topic. In addition to evaluating the film using criteria as we've discussed in task three, you can perform an analysis of a particular theme or area of interest to you as it is demonstrated in the film.

However you choose to approach the project, you'll need to refer to specific details form the movie to make your points. Use the examples from your paragraph analyses to think about ways to talk about the film.

Some more of the analyses have been collected to refer to, including paragraphs by

If you are participating from a distance, stay tuned for the media index page. Otherwise, begin by making a folder with your last name in lower case letters inside the bladerunner folder in our teacher folder. (Make sure to call your opening page inside your folder "index.html".) There will be a folder called stills and one called clips inside the bladerunner folder. When you build a web project inside your folder you will be able to link to the clips and stills by specifying the relative link information: to link one level up from your folder you would enter "../" To go into the clips or stills folder you would add that information. Finally, you would specify the name of the file that you want in the clips or still folder. For example, if I wanted to go out of the folder "dan" and into the "clips" folder and link to a clip called "someofmeinyou.mov" I would enter "../clips/someofmeinyou.mov"

You will want to begin gathering the clips, stills and sounds that you will use in the project. The films in the clips folder can be viewed without linking them to the web for now. Take the icon for one of the clips and drop it onto the "MoviePlayer" icon in the Apps folder. The clip should start to play. Check out the clips and decide on one or two that seem most useful to you. If there is a scene from the film that is not available, we can capture it on Wednesday morning. Remember that one of the limitations of the web is the time it takes to download film clips. To deal with this constraint it is necessary to make still images of the important scenes from a given clip and make downloading the entire clip optional for the reader. For an example of this technique, see some American Literature film projects done by students last year. A particularly nice use of stills as a substitute for a clip can be seen in a page from Bert Mikosh's project.

With MoviePlayer you can stop the clip at any point and make a still.

First, open our teacher folder and drag the icon for Gifconverter to the desktop with the option key held down. A copy of the program will be made
Next, with MoviePlayer, queue the film clip to the spot where you would like to make a still and stop the clip.
Go to the Edit Menu and Copy the Image.
Now go to GifConverter and Paste the image into a New Graphic window.
Save the image as a gif file. Use a name that tells something about the still, making sure to use all lower-case characters with no spaces.
Save the still into the "stills" folder inside the bladerunner folder.

That's it. Repeat as necessary, then rinse;-) Don't forget that additional resources are located at the bladerunner FAQ site and at the off-world Bladerunner page, and also at the Bladerunner Online Magazine. After you have gathered the necessary stills and chosen some clips, you can begin composing the project inside your folder. Remember to add any insights to the Bladerunner message forum. As always, let me know if you have any questions.

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