I believe few Americans still hold out hope that we are living in a post racial society, now that we are well into the second term of President Barack Obama and we are finding our civic discourse just as fractured and angry as ever. For a while after we as a nation elected our first African American president in 2008, I read in magazine essays and overhead in coffee shops that "maybe race doesn't matter anymore?"
Hopefully this 5 minute multimedia story about high school students discovering how the civil rights era of the 1960s shaped their lives is just as insightful as when completed in 2011. Please read my original blog post .
In spite of opinion polls indicating most people (mostly whites?) see no racism in their lives, I feel race still matters in almost everything we as a nation and as individuals do every day. There are under currents that race matters popping up all the time. Some could observe:
- The President is being disrespected by his political opponents because of his race.
- A billionaire basket ball team owner is a total monster because of his comments on race.
- Miami-Dade police shoot and kill in the streets an inordinate number of young black men.
- OJ is still suspected/ still guilty/ still acquitted because of his race.
These thoughts were going through my mind this week as I was re-editing my History Detectives multimedia piece I was commissioned to create three years ago. Archbishop Curley Notre Dame Prep in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood asked me to explain the importance of their being the first high school in the then segregated state of Florida to integrate 50 years before.
Taylor Altidor, then a 16-year-old Junior, told me "...we just couldn't believe that Florida used to be racially segregated, that blacks and whites didn't eat in the same restaurants...". I followed her advanced placement history class as they researched segregation and interviewed students from the early 1960s and prepared for a Black History assembly. Former students and now adults well into their 60s, Paul Wyche told me he was called the N-word at a high school basket ball game, and Constance Moor Thornton recalled "colored" water fountains.
The researching students understood such overt racism that thrived in the Jim Crow era was thankfully no longer and was not part of their teen lives. But was racism completely gone? The student detectives questioned, discussed and completed class projects that brought the topic into the open.
Addressing the assembled student body in a clear and optimistic voice, one civil rights era student said "We come from different circumstances, but color doesn't matter, it is what is in your heart."
This month I was in the process of updating my Miami multimedia photography portfolio and had begun transferring the original History Detectives from a Flash based player made in Sound Slides to a more universally accepted and iOS friendly H 265 video format, when ACND called looking a new high resolution file. Good timing.
I reprocessed all 123 original still photographs in the newest Adobe Light Room 5, squeezing additional color quality and dynamic range from the newest RAW processor. I always export as Tiffs with medium sharpening, believing compressed Jpegs, and over sharpening, could potentially cause video jitter. I cropped the original 4:3 aspect ratio to the video standard 16:9. This cut a little close to some image content, as I was not thinking 16:9 originally and had composed my images differently.
I added the stills to a Adobe Premier Pro CS6 timeline, imported my original sound track made with Apple Logic, and switched in a couple of new images but pretty much left the timing alone. I no longer liked the Ken Burns movement on some photos in the original, and removed it. I added a new title and credit page with a typewriter effect in Adobe After Effects CS6 ... a lot easier than this amateur video editor thought. On your P Pro time line > right click the title > open as a After Effects composition > in AE Effects & Presets search "typewriter" > drop that puppy onto the composition and bingo, you have the type type type effect all done for you.
I digress. And I used the American Typewriter font in PP to make new lower thirds. I couldn't figure out how to animate them too, so decided would be less busy without. I exported through Adobe Media Encoder with the Vimeo 720 p presets, and uploaded to Vimeo. Easy peasy.
I hope so, and I hope some day we will be living in a truly post racial society.
Technical Notes:
I reprocessed all 123 original still photographs in the newest Adobe Light Room 5, squeezing additional color quality and dynamic range from the newest RAW processor. I always export as Tiffs with medium sharpening, believing compressed Jpegs, and over sharpening, could potentially cause video jitter. I cropped the original 4:3 aspect ratio to the video standard 16:9. This cut a little close to some image content, as I was not thinking 16:9 originally and had composed my images differently.
I added the stills to a Adobe Premier Pro CS6 timeline, imported my original sound track made with Apple Logic, and switched in a couple of new images but pretty much left the timing alone. I no longer liked the Ken Burns movement on some photos in the original, and removed it. I added a new title and credit page with a typewriter effect in Adobe After Effects CS6 ... a lot easier than this amateur video editor thought. On your P Pro time line > right click the title > open as a After Effects composition > in AE Effects & Presets search "typewriter" > drop that puppy onto the composition and bingo, you have the type type type effect all done for you.
I digress. And I used the American Typewriter font in PP to make new lower thirds. I couldn't figure out how to animate them too, so decided would be less busy without. I exported through Adobe Media Encoder with the Vimeo 720 p presets, and uploaded to Vimeo. Easy peasy.
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