Digital Media Production

On Thursday April 4 I attended the first day of the 11th Annual Human Rights Film Festival at USF. 

I decided to see the first showing which was a collection of USF student -created short films. They showed shorts from 4 students, and I was thoroughly impressed with each one. 

The first short was called "Harthaven Children Home", which took place in Ghana and revealed the lives of orphan children who suffer from HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the video was to raise awareness for the orphanage in an effort to raise money for its day-to-day activities.

The second short was "A March Forgotten: The Triumph of Soviet Jewry" which recounted the 1987 march on Washington for Soviety Jewry. This was one of my favorites of all the shorts, because the beginning was really powerful, and I liked the music that the Director chose. 

The third short was also one of my favorites. It was called "La identidad de justicia: Mujeres trans en Cochabamba," and it was about transgendered people in Cochabamba, Bolivia. I really liked the interviews, and how transparent the actors were while being interviewed. They each provided really interesting insight into a controversial topic that I didn't know much about before.

The final film was also really well done, and was called "Rwanda, The Beauty That Still Remains." The film was about post-Genocide Rwanda in 2012 and recounted the horrors of the genocide that occurred between the Hutus and Tutsis. I really liked that the film included elements from Anne Frank's diary, as well as the music and dancing.

Overall I really enjoyed the shorts, and was extremely impressed by each of the students' work. I'm definitely proud to be a USF Media Studies major if this is the caliber of work that is produced from the department. 

I was unsure as to what to expect before going to Macworld, but needless to say by the time I left, I was completely blown away.  I didn’t realize how massive it would be, how many people would be attending, or even how many vendors/anxious entrepreneurs would be showcasing their products. The only thing I’d ever experienced that came close to something like this was when I went to demo day for Stanford’s start-up accelerator, StartX. There, a group of start-ups were showcasing their products to investors, at Macworld, it was more of a showcase of products to the actual consumers. It wasn’t until one of the Macworld employees manning the entrance printed out my name card, gave me my lanyard and a map, did I realize, “this is pretty legit.”

  I walked in to the convention and immediately felt overwhelmed by the sea of people. It occurred to me that all these people shared a common interest (and passion) for technology.

  I was immediately attracted to the loud music and made my way towards a giant robot that was blasting jazz music. There were quirkily dressed girls on rollers skates standing in front of the exhibit and it appeared that they were selling bikes with cases attached to speakers, robot speakers, and solar powered phone chargers. The phone chargers intrigued me because I don’t know any smart phone owner whose battery isn’t completely drained by the end of the day. However, upon speaking with the vendor I realized that the product wasn’t as useful as it appeared. Though it’s able to store power, it takes up to 15 hours to fully power up and even then it only charges ¾ of your phone. Mostly useful as a back up.

  I moved on from that booth to examine an app called iCookbook because I love to cook! It was basically a digital cookbook except with over 2,000 recipes and photos, with more recipes added each month. It solves the problem every person/cook faces with every day meal selection, and the ingredients used in the recipes are accessible and affordable. The only downside (at least for me) is that it’s only on iPhone and iPad. Bummed that my sad Android was excluded, I resolved to get an iPad as soon as possible so I wouldn’t miss out on any more cool apps reserved exclusively for Apple.

  I walked around for several hours, examining the vast array of mobile apps, and app devices. Some stood out to me, some seemed typical. There were many vendors selling skins and iPhone cases for example.

  I came across a vendor that was doing a demonstration on Photoshop. He was so animated that I had to stop and watch. It was some kind of plug-in that allowed you to perfectly crop out certain sections of photos and place them on to other photos. For example, he cropped out an image of a woman from one photo and put her in another photo with a completely different background. Though this may seem unimpressive, apparently it’s difficult to do on Photoshop if there’s a lot of detail in the image you’re trying to crop out (for example, the woman had a lot of stray hairs in the photo, and in Photoshop you’d have to zoom in to each hair and make sure you’re cropping it). I thought this would have been useful in digital media production, though I wish I remembered the name of the product.

  I came across an awesome display of headphones that were super expensive, but apparently sounded amazing. There was even a live band playing inside a studio type deal, and people could listen to them via the headphones.

Pretty great marketing!  

My particular favorite product was CrashPlan, which saves your files in a cloud so they’re readily available to you on any device. Their display was another one of my favorites…

  So clever!

I also thought OlloClip was really cool. It was basically a camera lens that you clipped on to your iPhone. It seemed like a really great tool for photographers on the go, or for people who want to give their photos an extra oomph.

  Overall, I found Macworld to be an awesome experience. I was sad to miss some of the guest speakers and presentations that happened earlier in the day or the day before, but I still had a great time. I’ll definitely want to go again next year, and hopefully I’ll have an iPhone to buy accessories/apps for. I did however, manage to get this little guy: