I’ve been using both iMovie and prezi as platforms for composition assignments in my classes. I’m wondering if we could get a a group together and collectively compose some short project in one of these platforms. Obviously there would be several issues:

First, captaining such a ship of fools. According to the “propose a session” post, I would be responsible for chairing. I believe I could handle this. I’ve been in numerous student organization, where I have been responsible for making a decision happen without making the decision myself. I’d be managing editor and we would have no editor-in-chief.

Second, the subject. With limited time, I think we’d have to jump straight into composition choices. So we’d need to have big picture content issues decided ahead of time, via commenting here I presume. My suggestion for content is actually THATcamp itself. If we have this session late in the day, our composition can share our collective experience of the un-conference. We’d probably also want to decide which platform ahead of time.

Third, technology constraints. I think we’d be pretty safe with Prezi. But if we decided on a short movie, there’s importing/exporting time constraints as well as the gathering of raw footage. If this session goes forward, perhaps people planning to attend could check out flipcameras in the morning and shoot bits during the day. As managing editor, I could collect these at the lunch, or at least sometime before the session begins, and start importing. We could export at the close of the session. This way, we could spend the majority of the session selecting clips, sequencing, adding titles, and other editing details.

I’d like to hear thoughts on which platform people would prefer to work with, if it even seems feasible to try to work with iMovie, and also about the content. We could decide content live in the room as this is certainly part of the composition process. I’m just afraid that too much time spent in initial brainstorming wouldn’t leave us enough time to do the actually composing and editing.