Hello Movie Group! We’ve reached that part of the course where it’s time to start working on your small group projects for the Dick Dowling archive. In this post I’m going to talk a little bit about the project you’ve been assigned–making a brief movie related to Dowling’s statue and memory. Please take time to read this post carefully so that you can begin to talk amongst yourselves about what you plan to do.
In the course of this semester, you’ve learned a lot about Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass that you probably didn’t know when we first tramped out to the statue during the first week of classes. Even if you had gone out to the statue yourself, you could have learned something about it from the historical marker. But as we’ve seen, even the marker and the rededication ceremony that accompanied it has a particular history that might not be apparent to a viewer of the marker, and there are things about the battle that the marker emphasizes while leaving other things out altogether.
In this project, your challenge will be to communicate some of what you’ve learned to a wider audience and interpret it by producing a movie about Dowling and his memory, suitable for upload to the Internet either on our Dowling archive site or a video service like YouTube.
Conceivably, your movie could be of any length and talk about anything related to the Dowling statue. But in deciding what to put in your movie, think about the specific virtues of the medium you’re working with. One advantage of a movie is the diversity of content it can contain–sound, text, images, and moving images. We’ve seen some movies in class this semester, like Henry Louis Gates’s documentary on Looking for Lincoln, which give some sense of the kind of material a documentary film (even a brief one) might contain. Consider the kinds of things even these brief eight- to ten-minute films manage to convey about Lincoln and his contested memory. Or consider these even briefer student-designed videos as possible models for what you might be able to do.
As you watch such videos, it should quickly become clear that your primary chore will be making tough decisions about how to fill the silence and make a video that will appeal to and inform general viewers while simultaneously helping them interpret what they are seeing. Those are decisions that involve both technical and interpretive dimensions.
The Technical Dimension
To complete this project, you’ll need to learn about how to use video recording equipment, and how to edit video files. Fortunately, the Digital Media Center includes the equipment you need to do these things. And the staff in the Media Center, including director Lisa Spiro, are available to help you. One of the first things you should so is meet as a group with Lisa (she knows you’re coming) to figure out the kinds of things that are technically possible when making a movie, and the kinds of things that aren’t. You can also ask about renting equipment to make your movie.
As you work on your movie, you may discover other technical tasks that you’ll need to figure out, like how to record or sample music (if you choose to include it), or how to strip video off of other sources (like, to give an example, this video of the recent Dick Dowling Days at Sabine Pass).
To determine what technical skills you’ll need to be make your movie, you’ll first need to decide what kind of video you want to make. Will it be modeled on a news report, with the standard correspondent-with-microphone format? Will it be more like a documentary with narration in the background? Will it only include images available for primary source documents? Or do you want to record actual video of sites in the city like the statue in Hermann Park or Dowling’s gravesite in St. Vincent’s Cemetery? Whatever you decide, it will be crucial for you to make early contact with the technical experts in the Digital Media Center so you’ll know the technical parameters you have to work in.
The Interpretive Dimension
Just as with the podcast group, the primary challenge for you will be to determine what to include in your movie. Before you ever record or edit a scene, that means you’ll need to script out what will be in the video and how long you want the movie to be.
As you script your podcast, the biggest question will be about what you want the movie to be about and what point you want it to make. To answer that question, you’ll need to think first about audience. Imagine your audience as someone who, like you on the first day of class, doesn’t know about Dowling and the statue. What should that viewer learn, in your view?
And more than information, what interpretation do you want the listener to take away from your movie? Virtually any attempt to talk about Dowling carries with it an interpretation. When Jefferson Davis gave his speech about the battle of Sabine Pass (DD0001), which might have been videotaped if the technology had existed, he had a clear message he wanted to get across. And later writers about Dowling have, at various moments in time, presented him in particular ways as a “hero” or otherwise. How will you present him to your audience?
The potential subjects you could cover are conceivably very numerous: (a) the differences between the facts of the battle and the way it has been represented; (b) the changes in the attention given to Dowling over time in Houston’s history, as signified by the placement of stories about him in past newspapers or the fact that a man once feted by governors and mayors and city councilmen later depended on small groups of descendants to promote his memory; (c) the contexts in which Dowling’s memory should be placed and the subjects (slavery? Irish immigration? etc.) that should be included to make sense of the battle or the man, and so on. The choice is ultimately yours to decide what would best make a coherent brief film that takes advantage of the medium and speaks to a wider audience. Given all that you could say about Dowling on the basis of what we’ve learned, the hardest task will probably be deciding what to say and what to leave unsaid, a decision that should be guided partially by your other decisions about how long a video your audience can stand and the purpose of your movie.
What Next?
It could be that not everything you would like to do with your movie will be feasible within the time frame you have to work on this project. That introduces another level of choices you will have to make about what to prioritize, what your main objectives are, and how you will pool your collective skills and divide the labor among you. For now, think broadly about what–in an ideal world–your movie would be able to include. Begin to talk with each other and make an appointment to meet with Lisa Spiro in the Digital Media Center.
By the time that Blog Post #9 is due next Thursday, you should have done at least enough groundwork and discussion on this project to be able to give a progress report and share ideas you have for the movie. The following week, you will meet with me to draft a contract for your project. That meeting won’t be useful to you, however, if you’ve done no thinking or learning about the project before then.
So you should think of these as your next two steps and strive to complete them sometime in the next two weeks: (a) meet with the Digital Media Center staff to get a quick feel for the technology you’ll need to record and edit your movie; (b) talk with each other about the project, paying special attention to sharing information about particular skills and interests you have; (c) begin to discuss with each other what the objective and format of your movie will be, since so many of your decisions will hinge on that.
And as always, if you have questions, let me know!