If Shakespeare had Facebook...

Facebook.

Who doesn't have it? No matter where you go these days it seems that at some point in the conversation someone will start talking about Facebook.

Rhett and Link (a popular podcast that I follow) have dedicated a song to the social networking phenomenon. I'll embed it here just for personal interest:



While entertaining, and somewhat true, this is not the topic of discussion today. I was received in my email today an image of what would be William Shakespeare's Facebook profile, and thought that it was share-worthy. Take a look before we continue (click the photo to open a larger, more readable version):



I found this to be immensely entertaining as well as insightful for future projects. What if, for a project, students were to create a facebook profile for William Shakespeare? Would Facebook delete the fake account? Or, would they allow us to use it as an educational tool? Would this create problems with "banned sites" in schools? I think that it definitely would be a project that would interest high school students. Perhaps they create, and maintain his profile for a month.

Alternatively, perhaps they are studying a play. Students choose a character, (all different) and create a Facebook profile for that character, and maintain it throughout the study of the play. Say, one month. They interact with each other online, as if they were the personality of the characters from the play. If Facebook was not a reality, perhaps they could do it through their blogs.

This is exciting. I think it's worth looking into.

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The Film Chronicles - White Balancing

Today's issue for the Film Chronicles is White Balancing. I have never really used it before I took the 476 class. It is like a new light has been turned on to make editing SO much easier!

I have never really taken the time to figure out the procedure for white balancing. As write this now, I shudder, thinking about all of the videos that were produced without proper white balance. Who would have guessed that the procedure would be as easy as a button and a piece of white paper. I think of the Debauchery Castle filming days where the same scene was shot over the course of five different days, with five slightly different shades of sunlight and shadows. What took hours of corrective editing could have been fixed with 15 seconds during production. "Fix it in Post"? No more for white balance. We'll fix it ahead of time. What a difference. How much time could we have saved in the past? I don't want to think about it.

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Lookout! It's Gonna Blow!

It is about the tenth week of class...maybe later...and our seats have been defined in classes. It's sort of an unspoken rule in classes as to who sits where. In 470, our row is front, left side (right if you're looking at the classroom from the front), it's always open, but it's a bit of a fight for which of the three computers we get.

Every day, Robbie, Nichole and I engage in a silent war to beat each other to class to avoid the computer that sounds like it will explode. Sly attempts to tell a classmate that they should probably go to the bathroom before class starts allows the others to quickly run to the lab and lay claim to a solid, non-explosion-sounding computer.

As I sit at the middle computer, I can hear it, and question whether or not Robbie's webpage is secure, or whether it might actually eat her account. Whether the flying shrapnel from the impending explosion of Robbie's computer will embed itself in my leg, or worse, injure my own computer and cause me to lose my own work.

Occasionally chivalry wins, and I give up my spot on one of the two good computers to the girls, and suffer through the uncomfortable whirring coming from the computer that is dangerously close to my loins.

Currently I am sitting in class, nearly unable to hear Jay speak because of the volume of Robbie's computer. I, fortunately, today have won the war, and am celebrating by using the stable computer. Robbie is threatening to never sit with us again because she is so offended by getting the bad computer.

I think she's bluffing.

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