Course – CT 380: Webcasting
Instructor – Daniel Phelps
Semester – Fall 2009
School – York College CUNY

VIRAL VIDEO PRODUCTION EXERCISE – COURSE TIMELINE

(Class met for 230 minute class periods, once a week)

This project was assigned over the last 4 weeks of the semester, ultimately being due, during the closing full class, before the final exam.

What makes this Viral Video project so successful, from a timeline perspective, is that a portion of each class was dedicated to a separate full semester project entitled “The YouTube Hits Challenge”. During this semester-long competition, students were required to post a short video every week for 16 weeks. Some topics for the weekly videos were assigned, while others were technology exercises. Each of the videos were meant to penetrate the blogosphere and/or the social networking scenes.

This assignment being the last “assigned” video project, brought together all of the themes, understanding, and technology that was discussed over the semester.

Feedback and revisions were essential to the production process for each student. The class critiqued all elements of the production process. While it was the student’s responsibility to justify each decision made about the video by using similar viral examples, demographic analysis, and viral distribution method.

Ultimately after 3 revisions to their “viral” pieces, the Internet was left to decide the ultimate success of each student assignment.

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Day 1 :: 11/11/09 (Wednesday)
– Creation of proposal for project.  Viral video research, determination of essence, and demographic decided.

Day 2 :: 11/18/09 (Wednesday)
– Pitch, receive feedback, and refine script and proposal.  Students are encouraged to create an “in camera” edit.  Homework to post rough cut to YouTube and feed the rough cut to two social networking sites.

Day 3 :: 11/25/09 (Wednesday)
– Final shooting and light editing in Final Cut Pro.  Post final viral video to YouTube and ten secondary social networking sites and/or social news aggregators.  All videos critiques on class blog and World Wide Web.