Andrew Salimian- City College
I like the project, “Indian Burial Grounds Under Lincoln Center?” Although I was disappointed that they could not find any evidence, I found the topic very interesting. Also, since Lincoln Center is so close to the Macaulay building, I found the topic somewhat “close to home.” What this group did well was post a complete video with a fair deal of editing done.
I also liked the project, “CUNY Timeline,” because it utilized web tools. In this case, the tool that was used was Dipity. What I found most interesting about Dipity was the different interfaces that can be used to view the events. I thought the timeline view and the map views were the most important, and I would love to see a timeline with much more data sometime in the future. What I was mad about was that they listed the creation of City College as 1948, the date of its name change and not the date of its founding.
The post, “The Battle of the Brews” captured what I feel is an cornerstone of New York culture, coffee. In recent years, the explosion of Starbucks has led to a coffee shop on what seems to be every corner. If in the movies that take place in New York, there is at least one scene shot of the protagonist in Starbucks or with Starbucks in hand. The video was uploaded as a QuickTime mp4, which I thought was interesting. The video also had a expert degree of video editing and the creators interviewed locals, which is important for our final projects.
I liked the project, “The Empire Hotel.” I felt the group took a very classy approach. They managed to get inside a large amount of the hotel and provided a large deal of historical and informational research about the hotel. I noticed that the sound quality is not great on the flip cams, so the group decided to just have captions and display the video set to music. As an architecture student, I liked the juxtaposition in the hotel of what the group said was a modernistic design motif shared with Lincoln center and what appeared to be the original art deco floors. The video was also posted with Vimeo, which seems to be a little more user friendly than YouTube. I will definitely consider using this video format on my website.
The last project that I would like to mention is the project, “A Walk along Broadway.” This project merged videos edited with iMovie that were posted on YouTube with Google Maps. It was interested to see each video experience in terms of its location. This just added an extra layer of context. I wonder if you could merge these videos with a timeline such as the one in “CUNY Timeline.”
