Three rules to learning digital learning (part III)

Rule #3 Share it with an Audience

Another rule in The Five Obstructions is that Leth must show his films to Von Trier and be present for his critique (they drink champagne and eat caviar for every showing). Von Trier is Leth’s audience. The embodiment of his critic increases the pressure but also fuels Leth’s labor to impress his friend.

Three Rules to learning Digital Storytelling (Part II)

Rule #2 Find a Story you connect with

Throughout most of The Five Obstructions, it is unclear why Leth subjects himself to this tortuous exercise. But at the end we discover that this is a therapeutic process to help him come out of his depression and get in touch with his real emotions in the storytelling process. Von Trier wants Leth to produce something honest from his heart, not his head.

I only started making videos six months ago, and before that all my creative endeavors were creative writing, dancing and doodling. With these hobbies it was fairly easy to me to access my heart and enjoy the process. But in making videos, I got caught up in the gadgets, the software, the codecs, and more.

Three rules to learning digital storytelling (Part I)

Ever stared at the metaphorical white page in MS Word pondering what to write? In my second storytelling class I learned that the biggest constraint for creativity is the infinite number of possibilities from having no constraints (the white space).

Rule #1: Set Rules
Every week, for the last twelve weeks, we had to produce a video – a self-imposed requirement. The most successful videos came from an assigned theme or a rule. Having a rule or parameter was the biggest jump-start to creating a video, but I didn’t understand why until we watched The Five Obstructions (2003).

The film depicts a director (Lars Von Trier) who makes his mentor (Joergen Leth) redo his movie — the Perfect Human (1967) — five times, following different constraints each time. In every instance, Leth outsmarts the limitations and produces an incredible film. It was amazing to watch the same film rendered in such different ways, and every time it was jaw dropping good. This was only possible because Leth had to follow the obstructions imposed on him by Von Trier.

Documentaries & Research

An interview with Scott Macklin, CTO of UW Dept of Ed discussing how documentaries can be used for formal research and how this applies to his latest film, Masizakhe.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by digitalecologist with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.