Big Media, School Spirit & Anderson Cooper #kpuanderson

Another September 11th

AU's 9/11 Memorial 

A couple of weeks ago I visited my alma mater, Wesley College in Dover, Delaware, for the first time since the year I graduated. 

I was a senior on September 11th, 2001, on my way to class when I walked through the commuter lobby and saw a burning tower on the TV's. It had been a hard morning for me already: on the drive in from my rural neighborhood, a bird smashed into my windshield. Blood was everywhere. 

I hadn't slept the night before, anxiety, restlessness, and back pain kept me up. None of that is too memorable, but the emotions that followed made a permanent imprint. 

Few showed up for our early class, and we were there for several confused minutes before school was canceled and campus closed. 

Classes streamed out into the street, and we whipped out our early model cell phones (pre-text messaging) to call loved ones in the New York area, or anywhere at all. 

Before all the circuits jammed, I was able to speak with a friend working in the Diamond District. Though he was far enough away, he's Arab-American, so I worried more. (We had watched The Siege together in South Jersey just a few years earlier.)

For the next three days, I sat in my pajamas, inconsolable, and watched CNN. I lost my job waiting tables at a country club. Finally, my roommate turned the TV off and peeled me off the couch. 

That led to my news blackout for the next several years. Despite being a student of media, I was not immune to the profit-driven media overtaking my emotions in lieu of providing actual information. Bad media is more than just mindlessness: it creates fear, misinformation, and wars. 

Eventually, I found my way into news so that I could be a part of the solution. As I sit here now just outside of Washington, D.C., I continue to work towards that goal. 

Horror Movies as Social Commentary: an interview with Lonnie Martin

Women's Studies is an independently-produced horror/satire about feminist ideals gone wrong that Lonnie Martin made in 2010. It was his first feature film.  

Co-produced by and starring his wife Cindy Marie Martin, Women's Studies got a decent amount of press back when the video was released.

But nothing like the amount of hits their website and Youtube pages got a couple of months ago when Jezebel posted the trailer and a barbed blurb, which set off ridiculous internet insult-slinging. They didn't even reach out to him for comment. 

  

Had I not known Lonnie personally, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it all. Just another white dude making movies with chicks making out.  

However, since befriending Lonnie in a film theory class at American University earlier this year, I already knew him to be a thoughtful feminist and talented storyteller. So I wanted to give him a voice here. We had a long audio interview a couple of weeks ago. Here's the first set: 

In the first part, Lonnie talks about his screenplays leading up to Women's Studies, and introduces his dream project, Maynard Comes Back, a horror anthology. 



In the second part, Lonnie discusses the old school horror of George A. Romero and connects the "torture porn" of Saw to the social anxiety of real life torture uncovered in the Abu Ghraib scandal.    

Wombmates #dc48hfp

The weekend before our final term paper of our first year of graduate school was due, half my film school class procrastinated by signing up for the 48 Hour Film Project, a contest where you make a movie in two days or less. 

Our entry was Wombmates. Though we didn't win, we were nominated for best short. It was a pleasure seeing it on AFI's big screen (twice!) and listening to the other filmmakers & viewers laugh as they watched.  

But also, it one last big team effort before 1/3 of the cohort goes away to Prague for the fall semester. Good work, team. 


Wombmates from Matthew Lucas on Vimeo.

The Delivery

The only Mother's Day gift my mom wants from me is to beget a few little do-gooders. 

That's not happening anytime soon, so I gave her this as a consolation prize. She was not amused. But I was, and this project was an amazing learning/bonding experience for me. 

The Delivery from Matthew Lucas on Vimeo.

Brought to you by the producers of Ray Cyste Beer.

The Anti-Commercial Commercial

This semester is wrapping up, so I'll finally start posting some of the video work I've done thus far in film school.  

For this one, the assignment was to produce a commercial. Being the conscious consumer that I am, of course I had to make a statement. 

It was inspired by a Caps game I caught on TV earlier this spring. All the commercials were for Coors and cars - all white male oriented. The friend I was watching the game with mentioned that the Coors family & company had a dirty past, so I did my research. 

Ray Cyste Beer Commercial from Matthew Lucas on Vimeo.

And while this commercial is a play on all I learned from a single hockey game, my intention is not to call out any specific corporation.

There's plenty of companies that have shoddy business practices, abuse human rights, shun worker's rights, etc. And it's going to take quality policy makers along with talented, thoughtful business people & shareholders to right all that. But that's turning around the Titanic. 

It's easier to change us, the consumer. I believe the most important vote an American makes is not at the ballot box every four years, but how we spend our money on a daily basis. 

For the Girls

When I first got to AU, these signs used to annoy me. They're on the back of almost every door in every restroom on campus. 

I took them as constant reminder to never let my guard down.

Somehow though, I've come to see them more as a sign of solidarity. 

Happy International Women's Day!

Networking is Easy

Kristen Edgell, a marketing assistant at National Geographic, spoke to an audience of American University students & semi-employed freelancers last week about how to get started in D.C. area media.  

She moved up from North Carolina last summer after college, with a few bucks and the desire to work in TV. 

TIVA's Getting Started in Your Media Career featured panelists Laura
Mateus, campus recruiter at Discovery Communications, Jason Villemez,
production assistant at PBS Newshour, and Kristen Edgell of NatGeo. 

She temped for a couple of months and landed an assignment at NatGeo. 

Once in the door, she took on additional tasks and made herself invaluable to the team by learning everything she possibly could. It wasn't long before she was asked to stay on full-time. 




My favorite part of Kristen's story, though, was how she went on 40-50 informational interviews by the time she finished school. (And I thought I was a genius for doing three or four.)

There are two big things I've learned so far about networking: you have to show up (duh), and if you like people and are genuinely curious about why they do what they do and how they got there, then all you really have to do is listen. This makes networking not only easy but kinda fun. Then again, I've always liked talking to strangers. 

But there are plenty of people who don't, so I asked Kristen for insight on their behalf. She started with a quote from Networking for People Who Hate Networking: 

“Introverts, the overwhelmed, and the under-connected fail at traditional networking by following advice that was never intended for them in the first place.”

 
A few other pointers: 

• Focus on a few. Are there people you can find out about beforehand? Spend your time doing your homework. You will not only feel more prepared, you will get more out of it.

• Pace yourself. Extroverts collect, not connect. If you speak with one or two people and feel yourself getting stressed, it's okay to step away and play on your phone for a few minutes as you recharge. It will help your attitude and also allow you time to perhaps jot down the important points of what you just discussed so you can do a thorough follow up later.

• Follow-up. When you give them your business card, write something memorable about you that you discussed, or would like to discuss. Then be sure to keep those contacts alive and intact. Send them a thank you note, referencing what you wrote on your business card. This will help people remember the quality of your initial conversation—and open the door to continuing the conversation. Gathering info with your keen observation skills and superior listening ability is what adds the quality to your connections.

Film School is Hard

Film school isn't all rainbows and Tarantino movies. 

I tried to do it his way. Didn't work for me. 

There's a ton of reading, a ton of crappy videos to produce before you get any good, and lots to sacrifice - namely, everything that does not support the goal of getting the most out of school & into the working world in a timely manner. 

Grad school, especially film school, is just like life: it is what you make it. You can do only what's required of you, or you can choose to excel. 

Charts & pictures make learning fun.  

I'd like to do the latter, but this semester my film theory class is 

getting in my way. I've never been much of an academic, and this class totally makes me feel like an idiot. 

Teaching each other: Professor & filmmaker Brigid Maher looks on as (l-r) Michael Nickerson, Michael Jee, Pat Flynn & Lonnie Martin school our film theory class on old Hollywood. 

I don't get it (Soviet montage, this means you) and I don't want to. That is, until we watched Citizen Kane and then I really knew how little I know about anything, and that it was time to pay more attention.

Extra reading and helping other students, especially non-native English speakers, decipher the stuff helps me figure it out more too. It doesn't hurt to have an awesome professor & the best cohort ever.

Another great prof., Maggie Burnette Stogner, did the video for Roads of Arabia, which closes today at the Sackler Gallery. 

Of course I'd prefer education be free. But the price of film school, for me, includes getting to know and work (and suffer) with classmates who are equally obsessed with creating & telling visual stories.  

I love grad school but can't wait to see what's on the other side. 

Before grad school, I had no idea who this dude was. Now I recognize him on the street, yo.  

To Know Coursera is to Love Coursera

Earlier this year I wrote about Tampa's Free Skool, which is part of a brilliant yet mostly unorganized movement of free education going on around the United States. 

Near the end of that post, I linked to a Cousera course that I had stumbled across, intending to take it. But I didn't have the time since I was working full-time & taking part-time grad classes at USF's College of Public Health. 

I was extremely lucky that my esteemed employer at that time, Tampa General Hospital, paid my tuition because otherwise I would not have been able to afford to go back to school. I wish that encouraging your employees to have more education was the norm
these days, unfortunately, I think those kinds of excellent employer benefits are becoming more of the exception. 

That's where Coursera comes in. It offers free online courses from America's top schools. Co-founder Daphne Koller said during her TED Talk that the purpose of her organization is to provide “The best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free.” 

After some struggle, I found that public health wasn't the best fit for me, and as my frequent readers know, I instead went after the program that was. Three weeks ago I started my master's in film & video at American University in Washington, DC. 

I've already learned that my decision to come to AU is one of the best things I have done or will ever do for myself, though it comes with a very hefty price tag, via federal student loans. 

In the months before I left Tampa, I was antsy and bored and wanted to prep my brain for school, so I finally enrolled in a Coursera class. It was Internet History, Technology, and Security, taught by the University of Michigan's Charles Severance, but known to his students as Dr. Chuck. 

Coincidentally Dr. Chuck was in DC the week after I moved here and I got to meet him, as well as some of my DC-based Coursera classmates, at his "office hours" in a cafe downtown.

IHTS is definitely more of a history class than a tech class, but since my knowledge on both the internet & tech world is limited, I figured it was a good starting place. And not a moment too soon - I can't be a multimedia maven while not knowing all I can about the internet and where it came from. Without that knowledge, how can I possibly become one of the people who figures out where it might be headed?

Coursera's IHTS might be the cheapest class I've taken all year, but it's possibly the most priceless.

Here's Your Sign

Ah, vacation.

At American University

Politics & Prose

National Museum of Natural History