Teaching with Video in the 21st Century: Clips, Essays, Full Length Films and TV Programs

Workshop at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Montreal, March 2015.

By Jeremy Butler, Kelli Marshall, Drew Morton, Matthew Thomas Payne and Benjamin Sampson

We’ve come a long way from the days when film classes screened 16 mm prints, but has it gotten easier or harder to present clips and full-length films/TV episodes to students in the networked, digital 21st century? There are many new methods for video screenings, but they’re accompanied by new challenges—both logistical and legal. This workshop’s participants offer handy tips and how-to’s for obtaining and delivering video to students. They explain how best to extract video from DVDs/Blu-ray disks/video games and out of YouTube and prepare it for student access. They cover online and in-class methods for presenting video clips and ruminate on the thorny legal issues surrounding the streaming of full-length films and TV episodes. The workshop also offers ideas for how instructors and students may create video critiques of film, TV and video games.

The above resources have been shared by their authors under a Creative Commons License “Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)” http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

(Mostly) Free Tools for Ripping and Sharing Digital Video

Handbrake
Squared 5 – MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac & Windows
MakeMKV
Critical Commons
JW Player (not free)

Further Bibliographic Sources

Bellour, Raymond. (1975/2000). “The Unattainable Text.” Analysis of Film. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: pp. 21-27.
Faden, Eric. “A Manifesto for Critical Media.” Mediascape (Spring 2008).
Keathley, Christian. 2011. “La Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia.” In The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan, 176-191. London: Routledge.
Shephard, Kerry. “Questioning, promoting and evaluating the use of streaming video to support student learning.” British Journal of Educational Technology 34, no. 3 (2003): 295-308.
SCMS Fair Use Policies, http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=fair_use
Resources page at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies
Anderson, Steven. 2012. “Fair Use and Media Studies in the Digital Age”, Frames Cinema Journal, 1.1. Online at: http://framescinemajournal.com/article/fair-use-and-media-studies-in-the-digital-age/
Butler, Jeremy. 2011. “Clip-DVD Tutorial (Mac)”, Television: Critical Methods & Applications. Online at: http://tvcrit3.tvcrit.com/content/view/68/116/
Center for Social Media and Impact’s Fair Use Information. Online at: http://www.cmsimpact.org/blog/fair-use
CopyrightUser.org. 2014. Online at: http://copyrightuser.org/
Mittell, Jason. 2012. “How to Rip DVD Clips.” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 12. Online at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-rip-dvd-clips/26090

Useful Instructional/Informational Videos

How to Rip a DVD with Handbrake (for Beginners): https://youtu.be/F_dw0NTVZiQ
How to Rip a DVD using Handbrake & Windows 7(Updated): https://youtu.be/2wKIDpGTrRU
Steve Anderson introduces Critical Commons during the lightning talk sessions of the Open Video Alliance conference: http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/critical-commons-presentation-at-the-open-video

Biographical Notes

Jeremy Butler is a Professor of Telecommunication and Film at the University of Alabama. He has taught television, film, and new media courses since 1977–at Alabama, Northwestern University, and the University of Arizona He is the author of Television Style, Television: Critical Methods and Applications, and numerous articles on television and film.

Kelli Marshall teaches film and TV courses at DePaul University. When she’s not teaching or live-tweeting Scandal and The Walking Dead, Kelli researches two rather disparate fields: Shakespeare in film and popular culture, and the film musical, specifically the star image and work of Hollywood song-and-dance man Gene Kelly. Her work has appeared in The Week, Mental Floss, AlterNet, FlowTV, Literature/Film Quarterly, and other mainstream and academic publications. Follow Kelli on Twitter at @kellimarshall or contact her at kellimarshall.net.

Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He the co-editor and co-founder of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the visual essay and all of its forms (co-presented by MediaCommons and Cinema Journal). His publications have appeared in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Flow, In Media Res, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Mediascape, Press Play, RogerEbert.com, Senses of Cinema, Studies in Comics, and a range of academic anthologies. His manuscript on the overlap between American blockbuster cinema and comic book style is slated to be published by the University of Mississippi Press.

Matthew Thomas Payne is an Assistant Professor of Telecommunication and Film at the University of Alabama. He earned his PhD in Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and holds an MFA in Film Production from Boston University. Matthew is a co-editor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, and has work in Critical Studies in Media Communication and Games & Culture. Matthew is working on a monograph that examines the production, marketing, and reception of post-9/11 military “shooter” video games.

Benjamin Sampson is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. His primary area of research explores the modern intersection between film institutions and religious culture. He also has a background in videographic production and contributes to the new field of visual essays. He has published several visual works and sits on the advisor board for Cinema Journal‘s new visual essay journal, [in]Transition.

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