THE
PUBLIC
SCHOOL
TELIC ARTS EXCHANGE

The class becomes a functional stock footage company -- participants come up with generic scenarios and scripts, then act in, and film many short stock footage clips. Finally, using extensive keyword-ing, they upload and organize the clips onto their "company"'s own searchable online database -- essentially creating a miniature version of GettyImages' vast stock empire (http://gettyimages.com -- specifically the "creative footage" section.) Afterwards, the videos might even be sold through the website like a real company (with watermarked previews viewable for free.)

The goal of the class is not learning film techniques, or learning the real mechanics of a real stock company -- the quality will be fairly loose -- I'm much more interested in a critical understanding of databases and "stock", and how these ideas relate to our new Internet-centric world of media -- GettyImages and YouTube strike me as bizarro parallel universes. And, of course -- it will be a fun social experiment, and I'm sure the end result will be great.

This class is related to the Distributed Gallery show I've curated for February and March. http://dg.telic.info/?a=guthrie_lonergan

Other possibilities: Real actors could be brought in. Participants could bring in props, backdrops (I imagine we'll just do it at The Public School, so maybe we'd have colored backdrops instead of real locations?). Someone actually in the stock footage industry could come talk or be involved somehow.

GettyImages search for "artist looking at camera": http://tinyurl.com/bo43ss
GettyImages search for "couple eating": http://tinyurl.com/abmv3l

Course explores different kinds of taxonomies and classification systems, comparing and contrasting. To make it more fun, we focus on Good Subjects!: Southern California plant life and bird life, stock footage/photography and keywords, alchohol classifications and specifications, Internet folksonomies, different library systems (i.e. Dewey Decimal Classification), music marketing genres...