The third major project for our course will center on the film Johnny Mnemomic. Your task is to analyze or evaluate the film in terms of the course themes: media, culture, and technology. As with the first project, there are a wide variety of possibilities for analysis, and you should think carefully about the aspects or questions posed by the film which most interest you.

The project, to be successful, will need to present a brief summary of the movie to orient readers, but the project itself is not an extended description of the film. It should clearly set out the question or claim you are planning to address.

For example, if you are planning an evaluation, you will first need to determine the category of film that forms the basis of your judgment, such as action-adventure, fantasy, science fiction, and so on. If you are planning an analysis, you need to set out the terms of your analysis: What approach will you use to interpret the film in terms of culture, media, or technology? For an evaluation, you will want to establish what criteria are necessary to a successful film of its kind. For example, if you consider the film to be an action movie, then you might consider various criteria for a good action movie, such as that the film provides lots of visual stimulation for the viewer, that it has a suspenseful plot, and that there is a clear conflict between good and evil. These are just examples; you will probably think of others. Finally, you'll need to argue for your judgment that the film succeeds or fails by your criteria. To do so, you must link your claims about the quality of the film with specific evidence from the film itself: scenes, images, dialogue, plot, narrative, sound, cinematography, and so on. Does the tone of the film overwhelm the visual stimulation? Does a particular image or scene clearly demonstrate the forces of good and evil? Is the plot clear or confusing? For an evaluation your goal is to convince readers that your evaluation is based on specific evidence, careful reflection, and sound reasoning.

If your approach is an analysis or interpretation, you do not need to provide or argue for a judgment; instead, your implicit argument is that you have something interesting to say based on a careful "reading" of the film. Just as in the evaluation, you need to link your key points to specific details from the film. Your goal is to give readers a fresh and insightful perspective on a film that may or may not be familiar to them. It will be important that you refer to specifics from the film when discussing in either case.

This project may take the form of either a print document,or a Web document using in HTML. You can add images to your print papers using most word processors. You should always treat the images as "verbal quotations" which need discussing and analyzing, rather than assuming they are self-explanatory. You might also think about web versions of the paper. Part of the discussion of the success or failure of the film should depend on the way it handles issues of visual as well as audio presentation, so a natural extension of your thinking about the way the film handles these issues would be to handle them yourself through visual or audio quotations.

The project should be four or more pages in length, or if done on the web, should contain the equivalent of three pages of original analysis.

Project 3 draft due at the beginning of class March 28, final revisions due April 4.

Handout for Project 3 workshop