In my opinion, the video titled “Signs of Crisis in the Gilded Age”, created by Kaspars Reinis and Ryan Heazel, is the best video produced by the students in 2015. The speakers are engaging and begin with a short introduction to the content that they will be discussing throughout the video. They begin the video with a historical and scholarly analysis of the author Gabriel García Márquez. The familiarity of the author grabs the viewer’s attention and strikes interest in the subject. The students site their sources and recognize the validity of their sources. Not only do the students clearly understand the content, they include their personalized opinion and reflection on the subject. They tell related stories and state the relevance and importance of the stories. Unlike the other videos, this video uses audio, video, and photos to represent present their ideas.
Ana Gheorghiu and Lindsay Chapman created an engaging, complete, and effective video on “The Colonial Experience”. The entirety of the video was photos and maps that portrayed the information that the students spoke of. They played music throughout the video and spoke clearly and confidently. The students showed that they truly understood the content by putting the history in to colloquial terms. Additionally, when the speakers spoke of “Casta paintings”, they showed photos of these paintings.
“The Meeting of Two Worlds”, created by Matthew Landberg and Brette Harrington was one of two worst videos. Although this video did contain brief photos, the information information that was covered was basic and the students did not provide interpretation or varying points of view. The speakers stumbled over words, were informal, and clearly did not have a deep understanding of the content. Although this video did include some visual content, transitions were awkward and the photos were ineffective. The students should have created multiple cuts of the script and done a deeper, more scholarly analysis on “The Meeting of Two Worlds”.
“Speaking Truth to Power”, created by Daniel Starr and Mackenzie Baxter was another one of the worst videos. Like the other, the entirety of the video was the two students speaking to a video camera. They read from a script and did not include any visual representations. It is very difficult to hear the second speaker. He speaks of documents, but does not site sources or explain to the viewer the context of the document. This video would greatly benefit from engaging visuals and audio.