Screen Education articles from March 2003

Screen Education archives from March 2003

Editorial.
March 22, 2003... We live in media-saturated times. Although this might sound platitudinous, the increased presence of the media in our consciousness is very much tied to the intensity of world events, the critical nature of many of them, and to our attempts...

New resources from the Australian Children's Television Foundation.
March 22, 2003... Australian author George Johnston's acclaimed novel My Brother Jack was first published in 1964, winning the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in the first year of its publication. The novel has been included in secondary school curricula for...

Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI): the big house of moving pictures.
March 22, 2003... WHAT IS ACMI? You have seen the building, been past it on a tram or in the car, you may even have been inside; but what is ACMI and, more importantly, how can you as a teacher, educator or academic take advantage of what ACMI has to...

D3: exploring Melbourne's CBO.
March 22, 2003... As part of a suite of production experiences, which will be offered in the coming months, ACMI has been developing interactive experiences for the public to engage with. D3 is the first such project. D3 is being offered as an...

Opening doors and minds: Alfred Brash SoundHouse.
March 22, 2003... Take a quick look at the amount of time our children spend watching TV and DVDs, playing computer games, surfing the net, and listening to music, and it's easy to see that the digital world is 'where it's at' for many. Embracing this culture...

21st ATOM Awards 2003: this year the red carpet was rolled out thick and splendid for the twenty-first year of the ATOM film, multimedia and television awards. There was no grander way to celebrate this milestone than at the prestigious Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The 2003 ATOM awards honoured the very best of film, television and multimedia in a gala ceremony and black-tie cocktail party on Saturday 7 June.
March 22, 2003... LURED BY THE LONG WEEKEND and the opportunity to visit Melbourne's newest artery for film, finalists travelled from all states and the ACT to enjoy the party and, perhaps, the bonus of an award. With a record 716 entries from all states and...

Brand boosting: blurring the line between entertainment and endorsment.
March 22, 2003... WHILST WATCHING CHANNEL NINE'S latest offering, The Block, I couldn't help but notice that the advertisements didn't stop when the ad breaks were over. In fact, the product placements in this latest reality TV series threatened to become...

Free trade: spotlight on the children's television production industry.
March 22, 2003... The most recent round of negotiations towards an Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) took place over five July days in Hawaii. In a media briefing at their conclusion on 25 July 2003, chief negotiators Stephen Deady (Australia) and Ralph...

Cross-media ownership: the debate continues: it is just possible to hope that a modified media system may emerge over time: one with power and responsibility--but to the public rather than to proprietors and government (1).
March 22, 2003... THE FEDERAL PARLIAMENT recently rejected changes proposed by the Howard Government to reform Australia's cross-media ownership laws. The rejection of the proposed reforms is evidence of the long-standing arguments for and against regulation...

Media watch: unleashing the watchdog.
March 22, 2003... The ABC's Media Watch promotes itself as Australia's major 'media watchdog'. Indeed, its web site is full of puns relating to this image of itself, with links to pages like The Pound, being the 'kennel (which is) reserved for all those...

Nightly TV news--the directors' cut.
March 22, 2003... INTRODUCTION Are you in the picture? There's more to TV news than meets the eye. Do you put more thought into choosing what's for dinner than dissecting the nightly TV news? Questions most of us aren't asking in front of the box...

A cast of thousands: the media and the staging of Gulf War Two.
March 22, 2003... Introduction It has now been three months since the 'official fighting' in Iraq stopped and coalition leaders formally announced their emphatic military victory. While serious if sporadic incidents are still taking place it is important...

VCE media studies unit three, outcome two media skills.
March 22, 2003... ON COMPLETION OF this unit students should be able to demonstrate a variety of media skills which will contribute to the preparation of a media production design plan, including the use of a range of technical equipment, processes and...

Digital grassroots.
March 22, 2003... SCENE 5 EMBRACING THE EDITING SYSTEM UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT For many people new to digital video, non linear editing on computer is the most daunting of all the stages of video production. It is certainly the most...

The structure of the short.
March 22, 2003... How do you make a classic short film? Why do some films stand out from the crowd? Timeless short films, I believe, do not tarnish, as they are made with a certain creativity, refinement and polish that hold and entertain audiences, Writing a...

KitMaker: making your own online learning from Fire Lizard Enterprises.
March 22, 2003... KitMaker provides an easy access point for teachers to create online learning activities for their students. Teachers are familiar with the task of designing learning activities which accompany a passage of text, however KitMaker enables them...

Are you talking to me?
March 22, 2003... DURING A RECENT TELEVIZED game of English soccer, a routine play was described thus: 'They had a cunning plan'. In fact there wasn't anything especially crafty about the tactics on display--one player passed to another who immediately...

Act before you think: just to listen to somebody and respond honestly, I think, is the key to truthful and compelling performances. Otherwise you are aware of people acting. It seems quite easy to do, but I believe that a lot of the time most actors don't listen. I think it's an endemic problem actually (1).
March 22, 2003... THIS COMMENT FROM DAVID Wenham raises the issue of the actor's approach to performance; a subject, it seems, that is rarely discussed within the film and television industries, yet is absolutely central to the kinds of drama that we are...

Australia--The Encounter: a short animation by the students of Meadows Primary School, South Australia: Australia--The Encounter is a six minute animation that depicts different aspects of Matthew Flinders' voyage to Australia, from both European and Aboriginal perspectives. It in based in a continuum of past and current Australian histories.
March 22, 2003... Project overview Meadows Primary School is situated in the Adelaide Hills and is a school for some 200 students from the hills area. Last year Meadows was successful in its application to the Carclew Artists in Schools Program. The...

Innovation in primary schools: a case study: St Ives North Primary School.(Apple computer technology in education)
March 22, 2003... The digital media revolution is in full swing at St Ives North Public School NSW where students are producing their own news programmes through the Kid's News Network (KNN). KNN is an interactive, multimedia online platform that's available...

Screening indigenous Australia: an overview of aboriginal representation on film.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... In surveying Australian feature film production over the last 100 years, what clearly emerges is a general avoidance of Aboriginal issues and a lack of any balanced representation of Australia's significant Indigenous population; at least...

Walkabout: simply a road movie?(Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Now that Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971) is available on DVD, we can hear the thoughts of the director about his film, albeit belatedly. Not only his, but also those of his then (very) young star, Jenny Agutter, as she looks back to her...

Reading Radiance: the politics of a good story.(Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Described by director, Rachel Perkins, as 'the first Aboriginal film to have jokes in it' (1) Radiance (1997) was released in both mainstream and art-house cinemas across Australia. Audiences at the 1998 Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra film...

After Mabo: what's at stake?(Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... AT THE OLYMPICS IN Sydney in 2000, the world was shown images of old and new Australians working together. The opening and closing ceremonies featured Indigenous performers and art. The image of an older Indigenous Australian leading a...

The Truman Show as a study of 'the Society of the Spectacle'.(Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... THE MEANING AND THE theme of The Truman Show--both the film directed by Peter Weir (1998) and The Show that Christof (Ed Harris) produces and directs--pivot around the above statement, by Chrisof. But things are not what they seem... ...

Clueless: too Cher for words.(Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... NOT EVERYONE WOULD immediately recognize Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) as an adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, Emma (1816). Indeed, parallels between the two stories--involving situations, characters, and their actions--are not necessarily...

Detecting happiness: Chandler, Hawks and The Big Sleep (again).(Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... IN HOWARD HAWKS' THE BIG SLEEP (1946), Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe repeatedly returns to the scene of a crime. The scene is the house of Arthur Gwynn Geiger, a dealer in contraband (implicitly pornographic) books who is currently...

Citizens, friends and shattered illusions in Carol Reed's The Third Man.(Film As Text)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... The Third Man contains a number of complex and psychologically rounded characters. In many ways, however, these characters also merely represent particular themes, issues and ideas which are essential to our understanding of both the film and...

The Matrix: Reloaded.(Screen Zine)(Movie Review)
March 22, 2003... IT IS FAIR TO SAY THAT THE MATRIX was a benchmark, a monumental achievement in the industry of cinematography. It set new foundations for the industry to build upon--a new era had begun. Soon movies around the world followed the ideas of The...

Reality TV.(Screen Zine)
March 22, 2003... REALITY TELEVISION: EVERYONE has seen the shows, or at least heard about them, Big Brother, Survivor, The Mole, they all claim to be 'reality', but how many of them actually are? Take a look at the concept of one of the three shows...

Poetry in motion or vertical editing: constructing meaning through video motion graphics and compositing.(Technical Section)
March 22, 2003... A character in the stage play Mongrels, by the eminent (but sadly late) Australian playwright, Nick Enright, proclaims that the definition of poetry is 'maximum meaning in minimum content'. For the conceptual, creative and intensely human...

Screentech 1.(Technical Section)
March 22, 2003... This month saw the much anticipated Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) conference at Sydney's Darling Harbour--three days of playing with the latest media creation toys under one roof. For many it was like all their...

Screentech 2.(Technical Section)
March 22, 2003... New players run onto the digital field with remarkable regularity. The list of high quality non-linear editing systems is now much longer than the proverbial arm, and hardware peripherals, controllers and components get cheaper, faster,...

Stop Motion Pro.(Technical Section)
March 22, 2003... It is a somewhat ironic, but none the less beautiful thing, that in this age of hi-technology and digital media manipulation there is a current steeply growing interest in the traditional animation form known as Stop Motion. If you've never...

Producing Videos: A Complete Guide.(second edition)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... MARTHA MOLLISON PRODUCING VIDEOS: A COMPLETE GUIDE (SECOND EDITION) ALLEN AND UNWIN, ST LEONARDS, 2003 Originally published in 1997, Producing Videos: A Complete Guide is now in its second edition. This comprehensive guide to video...

Aliwa!(Movie Review)
March 22, 2003... DALLAS WINMAR ALIWA! CURRENCY MINI DRAMAS, SYDNEY, 2003. Altiwa! tells the poignant story of he Davis family--half-caste Aborigines who resist attempts by the Australian government to forcibly remove the children from their mother and...

Inheritance.(Theater Review)
March 22, 2003... HANNIE RAYSON INHERITANCE MTC EDITION, CURRENCY PRESS, SYDNEY, 2003. Many people would be surprised to know that the north west corner of Victoria is a vast empty place with sand dunes and salt pans and ghost towns. The Mallee is the...

Reconciliation: Essays on Australian Reconciliation.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... EDITED BY MICHELLE GRATTAN RECONCILIATION: ESSAYS ON AUSTRALIAN RECONCILIATION BLACK INC, MELBOURNE, 2000, In the late 1990s I attended the Melbourne International Film Festival screening of Mabo: Life of an Island Man (Trevor Graham,...

This one's a keeper.(Theater Review)
March 22, 2003... VIVIENNE WALSHE GOD'S LAST ACRE CURRENT THEATRE SFRIES, CURRENCY PRESS, SYDNEY, IN ASSOCIATION WITH PEAYBOX THEATRE, MELBOURNE, 2003. How many theatre programmes do we have to buy before baulking at the horrendous price and crying...

Take One: Teaching and Learning About Film in Stage 6 English.
March 22, 2003... ALAN TOLLEY TAKE ONE: TEACHING AND LEARNING ABOUT FILM IN STAGE 6 ENGLISH QUALITY TEACHER PROGRAM, DEPT. OF EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND TRAINING, NSW GOVT., 2002. Although designed specifically or NSW teachers and students of English, this...

A somewhat tarnished pot of gold.(Movie Review)
March 22, 2003... DOCUMENTARY DIRECTED BY WAYNE COLES-JANESS LIFE AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW 2002. PRODUCED BY lPS0 FACTO PRODUCTIONS WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION. DEVELOPED AND PRODUCED WITH THE AUSTRALIAN FILM COMMISSION. VHS...