Screen Education articles from June 2003

Screen Education archives from June 2003

Editorial.
June 22, 2003... The launch of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) inaugurates a new era for media education. It houses the world's largest screen gallery, two cinemas and multimedia spaces where kids, students and adults can pick up production...

Deep space: sensation and immersion: this contemporary art event was curated by Victoria Lynn, Curatorial Manager, ACMI (The Australian Centre for the Moving Image), Melbourne for both the Art Gallery of New South Wales (from 18 August-14 October 2001) and ACMI (26 October 2002-27 January 2003).(ACMI And Screen Education)
June 22, 2003... This exhibition presented the work of leading international and Australian contemporary artists who create large-scale installations that physically immerse or surround the viewer. Visitors were able to move inside the art works created by...

Coup for Australia.(Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Screen Education)
June 22, 2003... IN THE TWO MONTHS SINCE ITS huge Screen Gallery opened in late October almost 250,000 curious people have visited the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) at Federation Square. Unprecedented in Australia, and with few...

Australian Children's Television Foundation on the Web: your next media lesson is only a click away!(ACMI And Screen Education)
June 22, 2003... At last! Lesson plans, resources, movie clips, scripts and worksheets for media students and teachers are free on the web. Lee Burton, Education Manager of the Australian Children's Television Foundation, takes you on a journey of discovery...

Film Australia's Outback.(Study Guide)
June 22, 2003... INTRODUCTION Australia's outback is the vast and sparsely populated interior region of Australia that some people see as harsh and dry, but others describe as a place of exceptional beauty and wonder. In the outback you can travel for...

The Accused.(Study Guide)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... INTRODUCTION In The Accused, the viewer is escorted through an actual courtroom drama. The accused is a middle-aged man charged with the importation of drugs--a crime that carries a penalty of more than 20 years imprisonment. The film is...

Australian Rules.(ACMI And Screen Education)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... The title may mislead some people as this is not a film about a football code, anymore than Bend it Like Beckham is about soccer. This powerful, brave and rather brutal feature is the debut of Paul Goldman, who co-wrote the screenplay with...

Australian Rules: 'light and frothy ... with some dark seeds thrown in'.(ACMI And Screen Education)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Australian Rules is about all the kinds of courage it takes to grow up in a country that still refuses to. It's about taking a stand, about the responsibilities of manhood and nationhood. It's about relationships: between fathers and sons,...

Remembering 9/11 a year later: what are the media messages?(Media Watch)
June 22, 2003... The media can not truly get inside the heart and soul of America. Certainly no foreigner can do it. On September 11, the US will be awash in remembrance, but I fear the unavoidable pathos of it, the exhibitionism. Cheap sentimentality will...

Double standards in cultural judgements.(Media Watch)
June 22, 2003... I TEACH TELEVISION AND FILM FROM A CULTURAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVE. This means that one of my projects in teaching is to try to persuade students to give up snobbery when they judge culture. I find that most students enter the university with a...

Live from the ministry of truth: how 'real' are reality soaps?(Media Watch)
June 22, 2003... REPORTING FROM THE RECENT MIP TV TRADE SHOW in Cannes, Variety quoted the Paris-based Eurodata TV research organization on the 'huge impact' that reality programming is having on television schedules around the world, with Survivor and Big...

Teaching about audiences.(Media Watch)
June 22, 2003... ON FORREST GUMP (ROBERT ZEMECKIS, 1994) I can't stop thinking about Forrest Gump. Why does this movie, which I found so emotionally satisfying, keep nagging at me? I even took my 7-year-old son to see it--twice. As a parent I appreciated...

Does the cinema represent teachers fairly? This paper looks at the way the teaching profession is represented in the popular cinema and what we can learn about career aspirations based on these depictions.(Media Watch)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... HOW MANY TIMES have we walked away from a film that dealt with education, students and teachers and thought: I wouldn't be a teacher in a school if you paid me a million dollars! Certainly adolescents must view these films with extreme...

Indigenous New Media Arts.(Media Production)
June 22, 2003... NEW MEDIA ARTS IS USUALLY CATEGORIZED BY TWO AREAS OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT: INTERDISCIPLINARY ART AND NEW MEDIA ART. INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTWORK DESCRIBES A PROCESS THAT ENGAGES MORE THAN ONE SINGLE ARTFORM, EITHER BETWEEN DIFFERENT...

Digital grassroots: a practical guide to digital video, part one.(Media Production)
June 22, 2003... SCENE 1 WHAT IS DIGITAL CINEMA? AND WILL THE MOVIES EVER BE THE SAME? The world of the twenty-first century is a world awash with movies. This multimedia maelstrom in which we float, gazing wide-eyed at screens of all sizes,...

Teaching music video clips in year 8 media.(Study Guide)
June 22, 2003... YEAR 8 MEDIA AT BERWICK SC IS AN ELECTIVE UNIT THAT IS PAIRED WITH MUSIC. (1) THEREFORE WE ONLY HAVE EACH CLASS FOR TWO PERIODS PER WEEK FOR ONE TERM--APPROXIMATELY EIGHTEEN TO NINETEEN PERIODS. THE FOCUS OF OUR COURSE IS MUSIC VIDEO CLIPS;...

Stop, look, listen ... and learn! Learning road safety issues and production design techniques through the RACV Transmission Program.(Media Production)
June 22, 2003... Students (especially those in the middle secondary years) love to have their say. At this time in a young person's life, searching for identity is important, and integral to this process is finding forms of self-expression. To get the most...

They're going to put you in the movies--yeah right!(Media Production)
June 22, 2003... ABSTRACT HYPE ABOUT NEW ZEALAND (NZ) AS A LOW-COST LOCATION FOR FILM/TV PRODUCTION has led to large numbers of students enrolling in the country's public tertiary and private film/TV schools. Not unreasonably, most of the students...

The essential guide to teaching screenwriting.(Media Production)
June 22, 2003... PART 1 AT THE GATES OF EL DORADO TO TEACH SCREENWRITING IS, in these times, to be working with ambitions which are similar to the mentality of a gold rush. Such is the dominance and the attraction of film, and television, that the...

Story and storytelling.(Media Production)
June 22, 2003... The following is a discussion of the components that make up a story, and the function of storytelling as seen in titles set in the film-as-text series. When a story 'works', it affects people--physically, emotionally, psychologically,...

Only healthy seed must be sown.(VCE Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... This article focuses primarily on the extension of eugenic ideas enabled by biotechnologies, in the bioethical film GATTACA (Andrew Niccol, 1997). (1) For the purpose of this article Vincent Freeman will be referred to as Vincent rather than...

Exalting in the terribleness of life: suffering and laughter in the Vienna of The Third Man.(VCE Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence. Rilke The Third Man is set in a...

Harry Lime's Vienna.(VCE Film As Text)
June 22, 2003... SO WHAT IF IT IS THE CITY OF Mozart, Strauss, Haydn, Beethoven, Klimt, the majestic Schonbrunn Palace, the exquisite baroque Belvedere, and all the glories of Hapsburg indulgence! Call me a lowbrow, a philistine if you like, but I wasn't...

Welcome to Frontline.(VCE Film As Text)
June 22, 2003... FRONTLINE (SANTO CILAURO/ROB SITCH/TOM GLEISNER/JANE KENNEDY, FIRST BROADCAST ON ABC TV, 1994) IS A FEARSOME PACK OF LIES, STACKED FROM FLOOR TO CEILING WITH DISTORTIONS, HALF-TRUTHS AND DELIBERATE OBSCURING OF THE FACTS. IT IS ALSO A...

The Castle: a cinema of dislocation.(NSW Film As Text)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... It's every Australian Family's dream--a quarter Acre block, a barbie, a pool room... and and Airport over the back fence. (1) The poster for The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997) frames a family snapshot between the shadow of a jumbo jet...

Witness the spectator.(NSW Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) consciously creates suspense out of the act of watching, which begs the question, who exactly does the witnessing and who is being witnessed? To say that Witness is about the events that unfold after a child has...

New world, old habits: patriarchal ideology in Star Wars: A New Hope.(NSW Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Although Star Wars depicts a new world, it is one permeated with the ideology of an old one. If films are the 'unconscious instruments of the ideology, which produces them (1) Lucas 'portrayed a world not dissimilar in its ideology to the...

History and memory in Life Is Beautiful.(NSW Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Despite Theodore Adorno's famous remark that, 'writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,' the Jewish Holocaust has remained a subject for not only poets, but novelists, painters and film-makers to this decade. There has been an ongoing...

The Lion King.(Study Guide)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... USING THE LION KING IN THE CLASSROOM The Lion King captures the magic of classic animated Disney film productions such as Snow White, Pinocchio and Beauty and the Beast. The brilliant animations crafted after many hours observing...

Breaking Bows and Arrows: a study guide.(Documentary And Genre)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... BREAKING BOWS AND ARROWS TELLS THE STORY OF HOW THE PEOPLE ON THE ISLAND OF BOUGAINVILLE HAVE WORKED TO REACH A RECONCILIATION AFTER LONG YEARS OF BITTER CONFLICT AND THE DEATH OF TWENTY TO THIRTY THOUSAND VILLAGERS IN THE LATE 1980s. THE...

What examiners say: students' essays about film.(Documentary And Genre)
June 22, 2003... FINAL EXAMS ARE OVER FOR THIS YEAR. MARKERS' COMMENTS THAT ARE ISSUED TO TEACHERS AFTER THE EXAMS NEVER SEEM TO VARY MUCH. OUR STUDENTS MAKE THE SAME ERRORS YEAR AFTER YEAR, NO MATTER WHAT QUESTION IS ASKED. IT'S NOT THAT THEY DON'T KNOW...

Triumph of the spirit: Children of the Crocodile.(Documentary And Genre)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... On Monday, 20 May 2002, East Timor finally gained its independence, and became the world's 192nd sovereign state. For the long-suffering East Timorese, the wait has been inordinately long. After four centuries of Portuguese colonial...

Dolphin Mania: a study guide.(Documentary And Genre)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Dolphin Mania tells the story of a coastal community outside of Melbourne where a small number of operators--with differing philosophies--are licensed to run dolphin swim tours. A code of practice has been established to protect the dolphins,...

Working it out: work and working life in the cinema.(Documentary And Genre)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... JUST ABOUT EVERY FILM HAS SOME form of representation of employment, work, jobs, career or working life. It is fair to say that where jobs are presented as part of characters' lives there is a major and disproportionate representation of...

Young film critics have the write stuff.(Screen Zine)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... Australian Screen Education is proud to publish the winners of the AFI young film critics competition for senior secondary school students (years 10-12) in Victoria and NSW. The competition was held during second term. Seventy-seven film...

Storyteller for the 21st century.(Screen Zine)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... No 'cowardly apologias'--this lacerating critique comes part and parcel with deep, courageous pathos... Storytelling (2001) is the third act in director Todd Solondz' tacit New Jersey chronicles, after bursting onto the scene with his...

Stuck in a golf buggy with David Lynch: Mullholland Drive.(Screen Zine)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Those not familiar with Noir director David Lynch, will not then be aware of the fact that his films have become something of a cultural event and his latest is no exception. In fact, Mulholland Drive (2001) is a compilation of all that makes...

Inside a Russian Doll.(Screen Zine)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... On a routine investigation Harvey (Hugo Weaving), a private investigator whose real goal is to write crime fiction, finds his girlfriend in the arms of another. Lonely and depressed he reluctantly agrees to marry Katia (Natalia Novikova) a...

Shrek.(Screen Zine)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Shrek is a romantic comedy, which is intellectually stimulating and has enchanting special effects. The movie is neither original nor is it typical, and Shrek is everything your average fairytale hero isn't supposed to be. Its unexpected and...

Planet of the Apes.(Screen Zine)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... The Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton, 2001) is an unusual science fiction film as it combines elements of futuristic space technology with a portrait of an almost medieval society ruled by apes. In this film, the context serves as a means to...

There with bells on.(Screen Zine)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... Ever switched on the radio and found yourself dancing round the house? Vacuuming to a song? Performing for an invisible audience? Essentially, Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000) is just that, only the star's talented, most of us are not. The...

K-Pax.(Screen Zine)(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... 'Get ready to change the way we look at the world.' It never ceases to amaze me how these types of films get made. No car crashes, no explosions, no pyrotechnical performances, and no cast members sub-consciously whispering, 'please...

The Four Corners of investigative journalism.(Documentary And Genre)
June 22, 2003... AFTER A GUEST LECTURE by Four Corners' reporter Stephen McDonnell at Macquarie University he generously provided me with some valuable advice on getting field work at the ABC, What follows are some reflections on my time there. There is...

It's a matter of opinion.(Documentary And Genre)(Interview)
June 22, 2003... 'THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A TV ON IN THE HOSPITAL WHEN I WAS IN MY HUMIDICRIB WITH SOMEONE LIKE PETER SELLERS ON OR SOMETHING.' THE MOMENT YOU LAY EYES ON The Age film critic/feature writer/ acclaimed fiction writer and collector of mice, Jim...

Attacking film: Mr Cranky meets Harry Potter.(Documentary And Genre)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... ARE THERE ADVANTAGES TO USING negative reviews of popular films that both critics and audiences love? How can such reviews be used in the classroom to enhance our students' critical faculties? Mr Cranky writes hard hitting film reviews,...

Macromedia Studio MX.(Technical Section)
June 22, 2003... Macromedia's latest incarnation of its popular Studio MX is a significant step forward. Macromedia Studio MX comes with Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia Flash MX, Fireworks MX, FreeHand 10, and ColdFusion MX Developer Edition. Each of these...

Using digital video in Director: an overview.(Technical Section)
June 22, 2003... PRODUCT: Director PLATFORM: All VERSIONS: 7.0.2 and above ID: 12109 This guide provides a basic introduction to digital video in Director. Director can seamlessly incorporate digital video to create rich multimedia...

Using Dreamweaver with server-side technologies on a MacIntosh.(Technical Section)
June 22, 2003... PRODUCT: Dreamweaver PLATFORM: Mac VERSIONS: MX ID: 16487 Starting with Dreamweaver MX, you can now generate pages containing server-side code that will be processed by one of the following types of application servers:...

Judith Womersley & Mark Richmond, Aussie Data.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... WAKEFIELD PRESS, KENT TOWN, SOUTH AUSTRALIA, 2001. This is a great book to have in the house to solve family arguments. It would make a handy reference book for primary school children, and could be a fun introduction for newcomers to...

Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen, Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... OPEN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001 Consuming Children is about the ways children and youth are positioned by the media, advertising, and marketing. It's also about schools and the possibilities teachers might have in this postmodern information...

Eds, Martin Barker and Julian Petley, (2nd Edition) Ill Effects: the Media/Violence Debate.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... ROUTLEDGE, LONDON, 2001. Here I am again, going over the material I have collected over the years on media influence for my VCE Unit 4 Media class. Once again my misgivings about this area of study arise. Yes, I do believe the media has...

A Force More Powerful.(Movie Review)
June 22, 2003... 156 MINS, YORK ZIMMERMAN INC., USA, 2000. Much of what we learn about political struggle focuses on violence. 'Great wars' are the staple of school history syllabuses and war and terror are the core of daily news. The point of A Force...

Risky Business.(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2003... A FOUR EPISODE VIDEOTAPE COMPILATION FROM SBS VIDEO. DIRECTOR: SUSAN LAMBERT YEAR: 2000 One of the less guilty pleasures in the age of reality TV has been the increasing popularity of docusoaps. For programme makers, that has also...

Behind the News.
June 22, 2003... Behind the News has been something of an institution on the ABC for many years. Like many of you I'm sure, I can remember fronting into the TV room in primary school to watch footage of the current news stories and then have them explained in...