Welcome to our Media & Gaming Lab Fall 2021 write up. This blog post is definitely a collaborative effort. We have been hard at work developing programing, workshops, symposiums, consortiums, lecture series, narrative production development and submissions for film festivals. To say we accomplished a lot would be an understatement. I would like to thank everyone involved for all their effort, especially the students and of course my colleagues, Xiaofei Song, Jonathan Guajardo and Ph.D. Candidate Anthony Ramirez.
We are proud to not only have done so much, but to document our events and process. We hope you enjoy the multi-modal documentation processes we have used, it is part of our pedagogical approach and something we are very proud of. Enjoy!
Anthony’s Academic and Amigos –
Want the podcast version of what we did this semester? Well Anthony produced a live podcast during our hands on podcasting day! It featured joey, Anthony, and students from the Media & Gaming Lab meet ups.
Production Days –
The semester started out pretty tough for us all. Coming off the heels of a summer where COVID began spreading rampant around campus, anxiety was high in general.
That said we also had a great set of summer meet ups and we were all wanting to have in person production meet ups. So we did! Over the the whole semester we met up in person on Tuesdays and learned all kinds of production skills, on location shooting, interviewing (indoor and outdoor), new gear days, check it out:
On location production day – On this day we all met up at the Village Cafe in downtown Bryan, TX and Jonathan Guajardo, Xiaofei, Anthony Ramirez and I worked with undergrads on some short films for practice. We had one of the groups complete their video after having a video editing session on campus where everyone helped edit it, check it out:
On location interviewing – We also had two separate days were we practice on location interviewing, one on location at downtown Bryan, the other in the Bolton building where the communication department is housed. We shot in the graduate student lounge. Here are some clips from those interviews:
Equipment Upgrades – Throughout the semester we were constantly discussing equipment upgrades, we ended up ordering equipment for podcasting and production equipment for our upcoming narrative project. Here are some pics of what we got and going over the equipment.
Audio day with special guest Maxwell Burgess – Max, a Media & Gaming TAMU alumni came back to campus to give a full in depth talk and demo about producing music and music for our narrative film. It was amazing to watch him work and interact with everyone taking the time to show us anything we had questions about. An amazing day!
Collaborations& /Big Events
Dias De Los Muertos Symposium – The Media & Gaming Lab was able to collaborate with the LatinX Pop Lab at UT Austin to host the Dias De Los Muertos Symposium, an online event that brought people together to discuss the cultural impact of the Dias De Los Muertos and share our lived realities with it.
Latinx Creative Consortium at UT Austin – On November 13th, we co-sponsored the Latinx Creative Consortium at UT Austin with the LatinX Pop Lab, which was an amazing day of workshops, lectures and hallway conversations that encouraged cross collaboration and experiential learning. It was amazing, check out the full write up I (joey) did on my personal blog.
COMM Media & Gaming Lab Mini Lecture Series – In addition to collaborating on events. After almost a year of meeting up every Wednesday online, our group decided it was time to shake things up and we quickly put together a mini talk series about film making. We were lucky to be able to schedule some stellar speakers from Texas and Chile to speak about their experiences in film making. The results were amazing with great lectures that we are proud to share right here!
Spring 2022 and Beyond
The Media & Gaming Lab has a lot planned for the spring here are just a couple of upcoming projects/events/happenings:
Ann Arbor Film Festival 2022 – We will be presenting at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in the spring of 2022, we crew of us will fly out and show our works and what we have been theorizing on from our own personal experiences in production and where we see new media works going.
Narrative Film Project – We will begin full production of Kali Johnson’s coming of age short narrative film.
ProfessorX and LatinX Pop Lab visit Texas A&M – Tentatively planned for March 3rd, Professor Fredrick Luis Aldama and the LatinX Pop Lab will be visiting Texas A&M where they will lecture, conduct workshops and collaborate.
Showing Trajectory – We plan to continue the Showing Trajectory Talk Series this Spring.
ACTLab Conference 2022 – A 4th ACTLab Conference is in the works for Summer/Fall 2022, stay tuned! Past ACTLab conferences can be read about on this website.
