First Day

Although for the last two weeks we have met as a group, today is our first official day of classes with the first seesion of our material cultures course. Our reading for the day was "What is Print", a brief but thorough intoduction to several different processess through which prints are made.

During my time at Living History Farms, I worked in the 1875 Print Shop for a short time. I hope that, going into today's class, I have a good working knowledge of at least the basics of print making, though job and newspaper printing is quite different from art printing I am sure.

This afternoon we will continue our task of editing our class video project. If you read earlier, you saw that during Orientation Week we were all given cards containing phrases or names. Our task was to identify the person, place or thing referenced on the card, then to put together a video advertising the Cooperstown Graduate Program and the town of Cooperstown as well. Our project is coming together quite nicely. I am on the editing crew, and we're getting into our second big round of editing. Sunday afternoon we met as well and spent a solid five and half hours working on the introduction and importing the film. It has been a really interesting experience, and something I have never done with quite as much depth. In high school, I made commercials for the French and Drama clubs, but that was quite awhile ago. The process seems to have become much more technical over the years, but I am very glad to have the opportunity to learn how it works. Mandy, who is one of my roommates, has worked extensively with the History Day project in Minnesota, and comes to us with a great deal of experience in all things film. Once our project is complete, we will present it to the NYSHA staff as well as post it to youtube. I will include a link to the clip here!