Crit Presentations

Students should prepare a 20m compilation of edited scenes that provide a preliminary (and partial) rough cut of the final film. While this compilation should be structured according to your intended narrative logic, you should include an intertitle with black background at the beginning of each scene that identifies the beginning of each narrative block (e.g., Scene 1, Scene 2, Scene 3, etc.). This will help reviewers provide more targeted comments on specific scenes as well as grasp the macro-level structure.

We will not be using P2P for this assignment, so we ask that you load directly to the Kaltura Media Gallery. Name your file “CRIT20m_name”. And don’t forget to paste your metacommentary text into the comment section.

Metacommentary: All assignments must be accompanied by a brief written reflection (200-300 words max) that provides a ‘meta-commentary’ about the student’s intentions with the assignment’s selection.

For this CRIT meta-commentary (max. 300 words), please address the following points:

A) Write a concise description (2 sentences) on what your thesis is about. Write it for an audience that knows nothing about your project. This will force you to rethink your project based on the latest developments and consider how to encapsulate this in a summary statement.

B) Revisit the following four qualities: Ethnographic Context, Anthropological Analysis, Cinematic Quality, & Affective Engagement.

Then respond to these two points for each quality: 1) How does your compilation addresses each of these qualities? 2) What doubts or questions do you have about your ability to address each of these qualities in your compilation?

You may recall that we discussed these during our first day of the Organizing, Editing, & Analysis workshop and did a small in-class exercise. To refresh your memories and find inspiration, consider some of the following questions. Rather than writing expansively on each of these prompts, try to write concisely in a single sentence or bullet point your gut feelings about each of these points. This will give those providing feedback an idea of where you think you are succeeding and where you are struggling.

• Ethnographic Context – In what ways does your compilation create a world for an audience to inhabit? What aspects of place and people are included? To what extent do the relations in the field, through rapport and reflexivity, establish you as a subject?
• Anthropological Analysis – What sorts of themes, topics, and concepts motivates and informs your compilation? How does your use of audio-visual montage within scenes and across the entire sequence of scenes demonstrate the intentions of your research and your application of critical thinking?
• Cinematic Quality – How effectively does the footage that you have included capture your subjects, location, and concepts in formally rigorous ways? What are the affordances and limitations of your camera handling, focus, exposure, white balance, etc. as well as your microphone levels, placement, richness, etc.? How effectively have you employed framing, angles, style, shots, etc. as well as montage, continuity, cutaways, etc.? What about your textual elements?
• Affective Engagement – In what ways have you tried to arrest the viewer’s attention on the varying level of shots and scenes? How have you tried to sustain a viewer’s curiosity through the duration of your compilation? How have you tried to build a rich composite that provides context while also building a mosaic of issues, motivations, and tensions that develop overtime?