Myth and Medium is my attempt to show the transformations of a mythic trope as it is reused and reinterpreted in new media. While I was making this project, a few major things struck me. First of all: the internet connection in Rutherford is absolutely horrible and I will never ever use it to upload a file bigger than a Word document EVER again. Second of all: my computer does not have the technical capabilities to do all that I needed and wanted it to do- at least, not easily and not quickly. I wanted to upload the video last and arrange the text and images first, and due to that I was left ripping my hair out at the last minute trying to download, edit, and upload videos for the Prezi. Did you know there is only one free FLV editor available online (and it is a DEVIL to use), and that all free video converters cap you at 100 or 200 MB files? Yeah, so I spent four hours downloading a 412 MB file and the video editor I downloaded “RichFLV AIR” is not user friendly at all, so there went another two hours. Unfortunately, the cuts in both the Final Fantasy 8 and Wrath of Khan videos look choppy at best, but again, it was the best I could manage with my computer. The Search for Spock clips are also very, very bad, and while I was able to use Adobe Premiere Elements to edit them, the quality of the video still stinks because I had to film it with my iPhone since I couldn’t find the scenes I needed on YouTube and the DVD was copyright-safe; it wouldn’t let me rip the files using Premiere. All in all, a very frustrating exercise. On watching the videos- I edited out some superfluous moments to save space on the Prezi and shorten my load times. The Final Fantasy 8 Finale is about 4 segments long, all stuck together, but they each work together in a narrative structure- i.e. you can watch the whole video and shouldn’t have a problem (except for a shot of some game characters running, again, my video editing software is unbearable, and yes I did try to fix it). However, if there’s any confusion, the text portions of the Prezi should give you clear enough cues as to what to look for. What have I learned about multimedia and remediation from this project? I came in with a very clear vision of what I wanted to say, and I hope I said it well. The more I have worked on it, the more I believe that while a fun and easy program to use, Prezi does not really do what I wanted it to do. It is a presentation program- like a glorified PowerPoint- and while its ability to host video and zoom from one slide to another without following a linear order is nice, it doesn’t lend itself to in depth discussion. The expectation is that I would be standing before an audience, talking, with my Prezi running behind me to support or supplement my arguments. But since I intend for this to be a project I turn in in lieu of a 10 page paper to Dr. Platter, I felt more text was necessary. I have also furthered my love for the Perseus Project, BibleGateway, and the Gutenberg Project. All of these are free sites that host text-based media, namely books that are no longer or never were under copyright law. Since most of the primary texts I used (Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings series being the exception) were public domain, these sites were more than helpful both to me and, I hope, to my audience. There are no direct links to Wikipedia this time- I figure if my definition isn’t enough then I have done something wrong. There are still plenty of links to my source materials, and combined with the interactive nature of Prezi, I don’t think anyone should feel ‘trapped’ on the page. I also have a Works Cited slide/panel, to enhance my credibility. Hopefully the Prezi says all I really need to say on the topic. The rest is just fluff.
