As cultural shifts and societal norms evolve around us, the media landscape has certainly become a wonderland filled with opportunity and fraught with risk. The Digital Media program at Analy High School is geared toward satisfying two objectives for high school students as they move toward adulthood:
Opening the eyes and minds of students to the role of media in society, focusing on its ability to influence as well as entertain.
Providing the tools and techniques to allow students to create media that represents their unique points of view, using safe and supportive collaboration.
The major goal of this particular area of practice is to provide a means for students to gain skill both in creating media, but also recognizing the ways in which the media that they consume is crafted and designed in order to influence as well as inform and/or entertain.
This program is lead by Randy Hall, who comes from the Sebastopol Center for the Arts (home of the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival) as well as teaching advanced digital media techniques at Santa Rosa Junior College.
The curriculum is divided into three major categories (with the hope that it will expand beyond these three):
Students from this program have graduated and pursued careers in the movie, television and commercial media industries!
If you have questions or are interested in more information, don't hesitate to contact Mr. Hall at rhall.ahs@wscuhsd.k12.ca.us
That's right, Randy has launched a blog for the Digital Media program here at Analy. Yes indeed, it's writing about filmmaking, and all the other stuff students do in the digital media realm at Analy.
If you're interested, you can check out Tiger Media Pulse.
In this initial curriculum, we focus on core visual literacy concepts, while students participate in creating media projects in a variety of styles and genres.
As students progress through the program, they are able to learn the basics of live video production, including deadline-driven media creation for the school's long-running live video production Analy's It's Friday.
As a final step in the digital media program, students are able to work on more advanced independent projects, as well as work with outside organizations and clients for media projects that bring impact to the community.