The Gambarato reading for Week 9 is now available via Blackboard, as listed on the Readings & Resources page – get on it!
Creating a positive association with a product as mundane as a toaster is no easy feat. Yet this chef won me over in under two minutes. This proves you have the ability to persuade your listeners with every pitch. Don’t believe you have a dull product. As a former correspondent for CNN, I learned that how the message is told is as important as the message itself.
McLuhan is high-fiving himself in his grave…
This article is an old favourite, for thinking ‘outside the box’ when it comes to story and how it should operate, and also for different ideas on where stories should come from.
Story gives humans a chance at survival.
Because of story and our willingness to guess, we achieve what most animals cannot: We pass along knowledge.
Naked and fragile, humans thrive in spite of a lack of armor or fangs because of story. All other animals must discover the world anew every generation. We iterate on each others’ knowledge.
It’s also handy as we move into our stories, and as we think about how to fracture them for different platforms.
Karen Gocsik & Richard Barsam. (2012). Analyzing Film. In Writing About Movies (Third Edition). New York City: WW Norton & Co. (accessible through Blackboard)
I’ve dropped a resource in the Readings & Resources folder on Blackboard that some of you may find useful. Be aware, though, and this is a big warning, that the analysis that Gocsik and Barsam are demonstrating is very specific to film. There are some parts that simply won’t work when looking at a super-experimental non-filmic object. But the general rules about formal analysis may be useful in unpacking and writing about your chosen ‘text’.
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