Back to School

Back to school today. Teaching one media course is a generally fun and challenging way to spend my mornings. As old media adapt their presentation methods there are more and more opportunities for content made by members of the public like my students. Time at the golf tournament surprisingly brought an offer to speak about advertising techniques in media and a proposal to provide content for the Enterprise and Journal. Expect to see more of Oliver Ames on ECAT as well.

People have shot home video for a long time, but the distinction between home video and professional TV was a wide one. Technical advances closed the gap between professional and consumer cameras, but professional editing remained out of reach until Apple created Final Cut Pro and its little brother iMovie. These software packages enabled folks at home to digitally edit film in exactly the same way as the people in Hollywood or the big networks. The final frontier for home video remained live or live to tape productions like the local news. Your typical news show assembles previously edited video along with logos, green screens, and picture-in-pictures. This has long remained the domain of expensive stand alone hardware. Even the little studio at the high school had a box called a tricaster connected to a monitor and sound board. This year all that will be used by ECAT to create programming in the gym and auditorium while our students will audition a new software package that does most of what the old equipment did in an ordinary computer.

Final words on the golf tournament. There's a famous book on golf called A Good Walk Spoiled. That sums up playing the game, but for visitors to the tournament you got an opportunity to see a very special kind of landscaping. The entrance road to the TPC has spectacular flower beds that are at the height of their beauty for the tournament. Summer plants are still going strong and are supplemented by pots of autumn favorites like mums. The wild areas of the course are home to turkeys, squirrels, and all the other animals that are familiar to New Englanders. The course design tries to blend the fairways and greens into the natural environment. The course gets very high marks from the players for its near perfect condition, but the vistas for the spectator call to mind Olmsted's "more natural looking than nature" credo. Standing on the course early in the morning lets you see just how sublime a local landscape can be.