Pop Culture: Design Challenge: Documentaries

We start our documentary design challenge today, giving us the opportunity to explore the facets of pop culture we find particularly important or meaningful to us individually while also examining a form of storytelling that continues to have a huge impact on us culturally.

How might we design 3 minute documentaries in 18 days?

Today we begin DISCOVERY Phase.

First, you'll need a design team of 1, 2 or 3 members.

Then we'll do quick spidea sketchnotes in our teams to determine what ideas, experiences, understandings we already have -- or think we have --  about documentaries

We'll dive right into watching clips from several documentaries and using a new discovery strategy to identify the qualities of an effective documentary as well as the questions that a filmmaker has to ask when making a documentary.  I'm calling it a Q & Q chart.

We'll watch clips from:

A Band Called Death
Spinning Plates
Magical Universe
Game Over
I Hate Christian Laettner
Blackfish

Note: We might experiment with our finding on Padlet before using Post-Its on Friday to help us sort.

Tonight, you will each need to explore as many documentaries as possible.  You don't need to watch the entirety -- chunks of several is fine -- but you want to see as many as possible.

On Wednesday, we will continue our research with several clips from which you may choose and a round of "What if . . . " and this exercise we haven't tried yet in class called 8 Box.  It's a way of visualizing a bunch of ideas in a hurry.

We might be using a new tool called Diigo to help us keep track of our research.

And then on Friday, we will take stock of our research, identify the key criteria to effective documentaries, and develop an empathy poll for the users of our documentaries to answer and Qs to be asked over next weekend.

It's a lot going on for certain.

Focus on today and what you need to do for tonight.  And remember, there's still blogging going on and a new critical creativity challenge to go after.

Show Your Thinking.

Blog.

1+ Post Due Friday. 12.4.15

Optional Critical Creativity Challenges:

Option 1.  Document your week using only emojis.  Be as specific as possible.

Option 2. Watch and review a complete documentary.  It may be from our lists or another you've discovered.

Option 3. Gamify Your Life.  What if your life was a game?  What shape would it take? How would it be played?

Documentary Design Challenge.  Discovery Phase.

Watch. Clips of at least 3 other documentaries.

Complete a new  Q and Q form based on the documentaries you watch.  Be sure to identify which doc spurs which thinking.

Due. Wednesday. 12.2.15

Film Culture Project and One-Page Self-Reflection/Analysis.

Past Due. 11.1.15

Phrankenomena and 3 Questions.

Due. 11.30.15