Shakespeare on Film
Interim Project Report:
5 March 2001, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovski
The obvious advantage that I saw in the use of digitized clips was convenience. Having the clips on a CD-ROM, where you can simply click on the name of the clip and run it without fast forwarding or rewinding a tape, was terrific. We would need to supervise the student workers VERY carefully in their digitizing of the clips, though, because three of the six clips that I asked for were incorrectly digitized. In one case, they simply digitized the same clip twice, instead of doing two separate scenes, as Scott noticed before he gave me the disk. But in two other cases, they didn't digitize the whole scene I asked for, either starting late or ending early. If we're going to do this, we should plan to stay on top of their work, checking all the digitized clips carefully each week, so that it's still possible to have them redo their work if they get it wrong. That strikes me as a relatively minor problem, which we should have expected given that we're using student workers.
The bigger problem that I found is still about the technology itself. We've now got several clips on the website, and I've run them both at home and at Kenyon. The visual quality is, as we expected, pretty poor, since the web connection can't deliver the quantity of data as quickly as the clip would demand to run at the correct speed. The result is that it has an abrupt, stop-and-start visual quality, and lots of blurring. So it strikes me that we need to ask exactly what our students will be seeing when they access these clips on the web. Is it useful to have these clips available to them as a reference -- even if the visual quality is poor -- on the assumption that they will have seen the clips in class, and so will simply be accessing them as a way to remind themselves of the ideas we raised about each clip? (The sound is fine, by the way, so they'll still get all the actors' line readings.)
That brings me to the issue of using this technology in class. Putting the clips on CD-ROM got us around the data-delivery problem that we've got on the website: the clips ran at the correct speed, with no blurring. There was, however, another, very serious problem: while the black-and-white clips (i.e., Oliver) ran beautifully, both color films were simply too dark to see when projected. I could see them nicely on the computer from which I was running the clips, but the image projected on the screen was terrible. [Is this] a problem that can be solved? Do color films simply contain too much information in every frame, so that we won't be able to digitize them clearly enough to project, or is there a way to digitize the clips where they might be brighter on the screen? In the end, I had to go back to using videos for my presentation, although it was good to know that I had the ditigized clips available as a backup in case something went wrong with the videos.
This last question seems to me a make-or-break issue for our project. We've already given up many of our original ambitions (like having the entire films available to our students on the web). If we can't use this technology to project the clips in the classroom, what real use can we put it to? Are we going to all this effort simply to have a BACKUP technology in the classroom and to give our students access to low-quality reference copies? Is that a sufficient payoff?
If we can figure out a solution to the projection problem, I'd say this technology has real promise in the classroom. If not, we might have admit that this was an experiment that showed that we'll have to wait a few years for the technology to get up to speed. I'm glad that I got a chance to try it out at this point in the project so that we can try to clarify these questions for ourselves before we build this technology into our classes next fall.
Sergei Lobanov-Rostovski, Kenyon College