So, this happened:

During our last Kickstarter campaign, we offered funders the opportunity to sponsor a media literacy workshop at a school, community organization, scout troop, or other place which could use one. One backer generously stepped forward at this Participating Sponsor level.

In a note to me, he let me know that he didn’t want his name listed on the page. Can you list me under some other name? Maybe a funny one? he asked. Or wait — maybe as “Lulzsec” or “Mr. Assange from the Wikileaks Foundation.” Or just… Anonymous.

I thought this was absolutely brilliant. So The Media Show is going to run the first ever media literacy workshops for Anonymous. We’re currently working out the details with a Girl Scout troop in the Bronx.

Would you like to be an Anonymous donor, and help support critical thinking about the media? Just imagine a roomful of kids who’ve just had a great time playing with media and technology, remixing and digging deep into where media messages come from, calling out “Thanks, Anonymous!” as they head back out into the world better armed to think critically about ads, news, and Internet forwards. Everyone can be Anonymous — you don’t have to spend time with Sabu in IRC to play along!

Support our new Kickstarter campaign! For each additional $550 over our $1000 goal (with or without backers at the Participating Sponsor level), we will do one additional workshop for kids who are not likely to get media literacy instruction in school Help us ensure the next generation knows how to read between the lines!

We’ve had a few requests to share what we’ve learned by running the campaign, including one from Mitch Altman, a friend of The Media Show and all-around cool guy who will soon be running a very interesting campaign of his own (so follow that Twitter feed!) I wrote up a good chunk for Mitch, then figured that it would be another good addition to the extensive documentation we’ve done of the show. So I’m posting my rough postmortem of the campaign here.

First of all, I read this before I got started, and it was useful. Good statistics about who pledged and how much on one particular project.

That article says you should have good $50 and $100 rewards, as people seem to like pledging at those levels. I somehow didn’t quite remember that as I started the campaign, and made up a finite number of $50 rewards, garnering some early criticism, and had to add more fast. (More on those prop-related rewards in a moment.) But yes, be sure you’ve got good premiums at those numbers, and make sure you have enough for a lot of people.

What else I learned from our campaign:

Having a super-complicated rewards structure (in our case a lot of unique one-off props from the show) was confusing and cluttered our Kickstarter page. I imagine that’s easier for others to avoid, so if you can, do. Although I do think our fans and friends enjoyed the props. It’d be nice if Kickstarter could hide one-off rewards which were pledged for. I may mention that to them. Aside from that the site was pretty much a joy to use.

What worked really well for this campaign in the end was having multiple descriptions of the project for different kinds of funders. I was trying to reach fans who knew the show, friends who didn’t necessarily, and benefactors who needed to be sold the high-level picture (perhaps without the puppets cussing). Having different sites for them to land on which made the pitch in the terms they needed to hear and linked to the Kickstarter page was a really good idea that I implemented late in the game. If you have multiple potential audiences, I would recommend leaving your KS page relatively generic, and when you send out messages direct the recipients to static pages (not on Kickstarter) where they will hear the pitch they need to hear. Then have a nice big button or link in that pitch that sends them to the KS page.

People suggested giving my Twitter followers pre-written things to copy, paste, and tweet, and tell them when to tweet them. I’m not entirely sure this found us anyone who hadn’t already heard the message, but I do think it helps keep the message on target. People tweeting “Support (my friend’s/colleague’s) Kickstarter campaign!” seemed to be ineffective, even when it came from respected thought leaders.

Do not bother with Facebook except as a means to find people’s email addresses. I wasted so much time on FB with so little result. You don’t know if people check Facebook, for one thing, or if messages from there end up in an inbox they actually check. Fan pages do not offer a means to email all your fans at once, just post on a wall where they’re not likely to ever see it. Mail enough of them at once (or rapidly enough) from FB, and the site will throw spam-fighting CAPTCHAs at you. And there is zero guarantee that your stuff will show up in your friends’ feeds, meaning your pitch there may well be a waste of time. Well, ok, there’s been some black-boxing of their Edgerank algorithm, and working that to your advantage may help, but I think it’s more of a crapshoot than it’s worth. Encourage other people to share the link on FB and “like” the Kickstarter page, sure, but in our case I am not certain this resulted in anyone new seeing our pitch.

We had about twice as many people thumbs-up the campaign on FB as actually pledged… This frustrated me for a little bit, and I did post a couple of things saying “If all the people who had thumbed us up had pledged, we’d be X hundred dollars ahead!” which may have pulled a few small pledges. But in retrospect, half of the people who apparently noticed the campaign on FB wasn’t a bad response number when it came to pledges, really.

As you may have noticed, there was very definitely a last-minute surge, or rather, there were a couple. We did expect this. The exact shape of it was interesting, though. We had a handful of pledges at higher-than-average levels, some of which surprised us. And then we had one very generous donor who offered to cover the gap of whatever was left. (This is the second fundraising effort I’ve been involved with where someone has offered to do that, so I’m beginning to mull actively seeking donors like that in the future.)

Various sources say it’s likely people will pledge a lot at the beginning and the very end of a Kickstarter campaign, and that was definitely true. So don’t freak out about your last few days — just spend that time to do as much campaigning as you possibly can.

If you’ve got more questions about our campaign, please feel free to ask them below!

For videos of a previous workshop Gus ran using The Media Show, see the Media Show case study on Pressible.

What Is Media Literacy?
This workshop is for teachers in training or college undergrads in communications. Gus will talk about the arguments in media literacy studies that went into the development of The Media Show, drawing on Renee Hobbs’s Seven Great Debates In Media Literacy article. Participants will begin with a short writing exercise, identifying their own preconceptions of what students should learn about media. The class will then explore different media literacy traditions and the philosophies underlying them, and engage with The Media Show as one of many potential ways to reach out with media literacy messages.

Digital Literacy, Authorship, and Privacy
As a doctoral student and postdoc at Teachers College, Columbia University, Gus did research on Internet users who put their finances, safety, and reputation at risk when they posted inappropriately revealing messages online. Between her research and her observation of hacker communities, Gus has identified a number of online skills which are necessary to help users young and old protect themselves, regardless whether they’re on technology as old as land-line phones or as new as iPads. She will share these skills along with videos from HOPE, the venerable Hackers On Planet Earth conference held every other year in Manhattan. This presentation is ideal for teachers in training or as professional development, or for college or graduate students.

How (Not) To Make Viral Video
While making The Media Show, Gus and EdLab learned a lot about what makes video go “viral.” This presentation will discuss a number of well-known “viral” videos and their commonalities. Gus will share the backend analytics data for The Media Show, discussing tactics which worked and which did not. This presentation could be modified for a range of audiences, from high school students to masters students to nonprofit and educational media planners.

Yell and Sell – Ad tactics
A classic media literacy workshop, focusing closely on how specific ad tactics can change the image of a product. Students will watch the Yell and Sell episode of The Media Show, which introduces the “yell and sell” and “branding” tactics used by different advertisers. They will then compare and contrast the different with sound, pacing, visual, and message elements of the two strategies. Using their lists of elements, they will develop their own ads by manipulating video or print clips from existing ads, changing the strategy to change the product image. The workshop ends with a presentation of these ads. (This is the lesson featured in http://themediashow.pressible.org/topic/the-case-study/teaching-media-literacy/classroom-practice ) Ideal for any teacher seeking discussions about ads, particularly language arts, communications/journalism, social studies, etc.

TV Tropes
“Tropes” are story elements which come up in literature, television, movies, and comics over and over and over again. When used too much, they’re essentially writers’ crutches; when used well, they can be shorthand to let writers accomplish a great deal quickly. This workshop will have middle-to-high-school students explore tvtropes.org, a nearly inexhaustible, crowdsourced list of tropes in different media. They will seek tropes they recognize, and see if their own ideas for tropes exist in this database already. They will watch the TV Tropes episode of The Media Show as an example of how to use tropes, then make their own episodes (or write scripts) using a few tropes of their choosing. Great for literature classes, communications classes, or just for fun!

Greenwashing
Students will watch the Greenwashing episode of The Media Show and use sinsofgreenwashing.org and greenerchoices.org to explore the concept of “greenwashing,” or companies making a big public show of their environmental friendliness. Students will then develop their own ads, either in print or in video, using “greenwashing” tactics to sell less-than-friendly products. Good for science classes, communications and media classes, social studies classes, etc.

Ads and ethics
Where is it OK for ads to be in our lives? When do they become too intrusive? Students will watch Media Show episodes about billboards, jingles on cell phones, and ads on classroom tests (yes, some teachers have actually been selling ad space on tests!). After small-group discussion, they will put together a “sock-puppet” debate about their groups’ conclusions about the ethics of advertising in different spaces of our lives — creating and using actual sock puppets to have the debate. The debates will be filmed for posterity! Recommended for ethics classes, debate teams, social studies, etc.

Welcome to The Media Show. If you’re a teacher, professor, librarian, journalist, or other person currently wearing their serious-grown-up hat, this article will explain a little bit about what The Media Show is, and why we do what we do.

The Story So Far

Weena Jimenez, a sixteen-year-old punk puppet with an attitude problem, has decided that she learns way more while skipping school than being bored to death in a classroom. Her more responsible older sister, Erna, runs after her to try to keep her from catastrophically messing up her life.

One day, Weena finds an abandoned closet at an advertising agency. She decides it’s a perfect place to run the YouTube show she’s always wanted to — a rage-fueled review of advertising and the ways it impacts our lives. Erna has other plans, however: she has always wanted to become a YouTube celebrity with her fan-made homages to her favorite movies and shows and her reviews of all things pop culture.

The result? A tempestuous series of episodes in which Weena catches Erna taking naked pictures for her Myspace page, Erna conspires to greenwash the show’s image, and both of them learn about spam, flame wars, photo manipulation, and copyright law.

The girls hire a college-aged Intern and put her through a brutal regime of viewing gender-imbalanced ads, among other tortures. Occasionally, their fights are mediated by Bryan, a sympathetic former employee of a TV-ratings company.

Why? Here’s why the show goes like this:

The Characters

A lot of the show’s goals come back to Erna and Weena, who they are, and how they feel about the media.

While I was doing my doctorate, reading studies on media effects and media literacy, I was struck by the number of studies which started with assumptions either that media were harmful to youth behavior, or young media viewers were resistant to and even creative with the narratives media told them.

Henry Jenkins has done a lot with the latter. He has worked to dispel myths that “fans” are all willing dupes of their favorite media. Researchers following his lead have documented how fans repurpose TV and movie characters to make their own stories, videos, music, websites and so on.

Meanwhile, the big wave of “TV and video games are bad because they make kids violent and/or obese” studies were still crashing down on my classmates and I at Teachers’ College, with students from the Health Studies department coming over to Communications and Tech because a class on media and youth was required in their program.

Then, of course you had Adbusters, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Robert McChesney, Neil Postman and others. They critique the institutional structure of media, arguing that structure also had effects on the media which shape our thinking about the world around us.

It never seems that simple to me. Are *all* fans actively repurposing the shows they watch? Which are, which aren’t, and why? Is it something *inherent* about the media and technology that gives them harmful properties? Or does public discourse just keep saying that because new technologies are an easy scapegoat for societal problems? Is it possible that *sometimes* we’re trapped by the economic and technological shape of the media, and other times we can use them in rebellious ways?

By making Weena a punk who (mostly) hates all ad-driven media, and Erna a fangirl who (mostly) loves the creative expressive opportunities media and technology offer, I hoped to drive the show with debates about the impact of media and technology in our lives. (And, of course, the more complicated they are as characters, the more complex our debates can be.) Having a prompt for audience feedback at the end of most episodes also invites more perspectives than the girls (and our scriptwriters) come up with. The best example of the girls having a complicated discussion is My Hotness Is Pastede On Yey!, a history of photo manipulation throughout the centuries. Hollister Is A Cowtown and Online Predators also brought out a number of perspectives from viewers.

YouTube

Why publish on YouTube? a lot of people ask. Vimeo’s prettier and classier. TeacherTube can make it into classrooms where YouTube is blocked. Other video platforms invite more high-minded discussion.

YouTube takes a lot of flak in certain quarters for being a cesspool of racist, sexist, and otherwise idiotic Internet comments. Frankly, we’re happy to be right in the middle of that.

YouTube is a hugely influential site. I’ve heard it said that in addition to being the most popular video outlet on the Web, it’s also the second most popular music site. The way it recommends similar videos to viewers makes it more likely that viewers will stumble upon our videos when they are looking for something else. For example, we’ve seen a ton of traffic on our Yell and Sell video when people have been looking for (and unable to find) an old Henson Company video titled “Sell Sell Sell.”

Our aim is to be seen, not necessarily to be seen as sophisticated; if YouTube is a destination for people looking for video content, that’s where we’re going to be. If it’s where people are arguing over whether Obama’s birth certificate is valid, you’d better believe we’d like to be there sending those people to Snopes.com and Factcheck.org.

School vs. out-of-school

One of the show’s aims is to educate outside of a school setting. Some research has shown that when teaching critical perspectives on the media, teachers sometimes inadvertently encourage a hypercritical (or simply middle-class) evaluation of what is “good” or “bad” about them among their students. Buckingham (2003) reports that students in these situations have been seen mimicking their teachers’ attitudes in class, then switching back to their usual attitudes towards media outside the classroom.

By attempting to reach people — and not just youth! — outside of classrooms, we hope that we can avoid framing our discussions in the context of a teacher’s expectations. (Our puppets curse, throw around blood and gore, and make references to Silence of the Lambs, and that also makes us less classroom-friendly. Still, some of our episodes are less heavy on the adult themes, and there are adventuresome teachers, particularly at the college level, who use our videos in the classroom anyway. And we welcome them!) Of course, we know we have our own expectations, and doubtless these come through in the show; and viewers bring their own expectations too. But we hope that being in the more freewheeling environment of online video means that people will encounter our episodes in their own homes, in the frame of their everyday lives, where they feel more comfortable engaging with them on their own terms.

Puppets

Why use puppets? some people ask. A lot of them seem convinced that anyone over Sesame Street age will be dismissive of puppets. We’ve even had a few people who think we are being misleading — that by having puppets we’re promising to be cuddly, for little kids — and they’re disturbed when we start doing things like taking chainsaws to people.

There’s a few reasons. First of all, we’re far from the first show to adapt “kiddie” media for darker grown-up purposes. South Park is the prime example, of course. In the puppet world, there’s been Team America: World Police, Crank Yankers, Greg The Bunny, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Wonder Showzen, Sifl and Olly, Henson Stuffed and Unstrung… the list goes on and on, some of it grosser than other parts. (Don’t go watching Meet The Feebles as your first introduction to grown-up puppetry, for example. Peter Jackson’s not all sweet little hobbits and King Kong.)

We chose puppets because they can do things human beings can’t, and get away with it. It would mean something different if we had a human character break windows, haul out a bloody bucket of eyeballs, go naked, get eaten by a monster, or wear a fursuit than if we had Weena and Erna doing it. Having a puppet do our interviews is even a little different from having a person do them.

Why not animation, then? Animation is wayyyy more time-consuming, and we haven’t got the skills, particularly since we left EdLab, where there were a handful of competent animators working with us.

Yes, some people are turned off by puppets, and yes, that probably does limit the appeal of the show. In truth, we need to know more about who doesn’t like puppets and why, to make sure we’re reaching people who have never heard the ideas we’re spreading. At the moment, we don’t have the staff or resources to do this. But if you know a grantmaker who’d like to help us out…

So here, for your enjoyment, is the document that sold AfterEd.tv (rest its pixellated departed soul) on producing The Media Show. It’s actually still not a bad statement of purpose. I’ll be annotating it here, though, because some things have certainly changed since 2008! I’ll post some other writing about the show’s rationale and the theory supporting it in the next week.

Programming Proposal: The Media Show (tentative title)1

This show is aimed at high schoolers and perhaps undergrads2, with the secondary goal of providing some springboards for teachers who might want to use our content to start discussions in their classes. Its goal is to start conversations about (youth) media production, copyright and ownership issues, media and technology in education, and the influence of advertising.

The show will be sort of an audience-interaction version of Mystery Science Theater 3000 – including the bits at the beginning of MST3K where the robots and Joel showed off their inventions.3 Episodes prompt viewers to produce content or capture happenings in their own neighborhoods – a phenomenon that’s already happening on YouTube.

The format on our end (for the prompts) will largely be puppet show, with three puppets and some human visitors. There may periodically be a need for still graphics, animation, or some live-action shoots outside the studio.

The characters

The puppets, like Willoby and Himrod4 (who could make guest appearances!) have very different personalities. Weena is a puppet who is constructed mostly out of someone’s old punk clothing – permanent-marker anarchy signs, ripped black jeans, safety pins, scraps of t-shirts, patches, studs, etc. She is a little bit hyper, always ready to make fun of advertising, talk back to the TV, or scream out “Smash the state!”

Erna, her sister, is a little quieter and slower and not sure about Weena’s attitude to TV. She is warm and fuzzy, like a teddy bear or Yorkshire terrier, and actually kind of likes most media – she makes her own fan videos and songs, writes fan letters to celebrities, and periodically hums commercial jingles to herself. When pushed, though, she can really turn on the charm, exuding a sweetness which is almost Stepford Wives-like in its intensity.5

Both Erna and Weena are jazzed about making media, but for very different reasons. Erna wants to revolutionize media, while Weena just wants to perpetuate fan culture.6 This puts both of them at odds with copyright law regularly.

Sometimes we also meet their nonverbal baby brother Franz, who likes to wave his muppety arms and direct everyone else in his own incoherent interpretations of movies. Human characters may also visit from time to time.7 (Findings from Sesame Street indicate people pay more attention to the screen when there’s humans and puppets on at the same time!)

The set

Erna and Weena live in a forgotten storage room in a huge advertising firm in Manhattan. As such, they are basically scavengers, living and making media off things they find lying around, discarded, or things they’ve stolen. This is a good lead in for reinterpreting and repurposing media, as they can talk about things they’ve found. It also makes for a nice junky visually interesting pack-rat-style set (which I’d like to permanently establish in one of the downstairs set rooms rather than doing it greenscreen like Willoby and Himrod – less post-production work, and it will give the space a sense of cavernous depth).8

How an episode will go

The scene begins with Erna, Weena, and whoever else happens to be around establishing the theme of the episode with a little dialog – maybe the girls are having a fight, or one of them is working on a video, or has found something new and cool or else really shameless and tacky and dragged it back to the storage room. They might screen a video or present other media which would be an example of what we’re looking for in a contest.

The setting makes it possible to bring in guests from the media industry pretty easily as well – they might wander into the storage room, thinking it is a bathroom, and Weena and Erna engage them in conversation which a teacher might want to use in a media literacy class, or which might be interesting to students who want to pursue a media career.9

Some episodes will be interviews or responses to audience feedback. Others will present a new contest. Contests will invite media feedback from viewers – still images, videos, songs, dances, parodies of all sorts – which could either be sent to us or put up in our blog/YouTube comments. We’ll pick the best entrant, and he or she should win a free Media Show tee-shirt. (These should be really cool and artistic and not just logo-based, like the ones up at threadless.com – the kind of shirt that makes people say “where did you get that?!” There should be a series of them produced in “limited-edition” runs. Ian has agreed that he might design shirts for this. We can probably screen them ourselves pretty easily – I’ve done a little silkscreening before.)10

Erna and Weena are constantly at risk of being found out because they’re living where they shouldn’t and repurposing media which don’t belong to them. So some episodes will focus a little more on digital media rights, and these will have a sort of sense of urgency as the girls try to keep from being found out.

Possible contest/viewer response ideas:

• Interpret an ad/voiceover of an ad
• Fill in a word balloon on an ad (word balloon project)
• We swede a movie you made11
• Your questions for people in film industry/music industry/etc about what it’s really like
• Your questions about copyright and fair use
• Your questions about cease and desist letters from the RIAA
• Make your case for why your favorite show should not have been cancelled
• Find us a fake-ass website, or one you think is dubious, and we’ll tell you whether it’s legit
• Best defacing of an ad
• Our show needs a dance. Make us one that everyone can do.
• Make us a video about your online protest

Possible episode ideas:

• Ad-industry ads up in Times Square (116th st on the A train????) Ask people on the street what they think these ads mean12
• Reading from this week’s AdWeek/Advertising Age
• Stories from people who have gone through modelling/art/film/etc schools which are really a scam
• Jaded media industry folks tell it like it T-I-tis
• Food photography: how they make it look so good13

Steps

Puppets and a set need to be made, obviously, and shirts would need to be screened. Then a few loose scripts should be developed for the puppets and people to riff off of.14 We should also identify some people in the media industry who’d be willing to talk to us.

———–

From here, you may want to check out the report I wrote to the managing producers at AfterEd one year into production, which describes changes we made and suggests other new directions.

Notes

1) Tentative title, huh? Just like the theme song, which we also declared early on was sort of a placeholder, we don’t seem to have changed the title. It used to make us a little hard to search for, but after links from Slashdot and the EFF, we seem to have gained link cred for our name.

2) Have you ever noticed how there’s not much TV made specifically for a high-school audience? Educational TV has generally avoided touching that demographic with a twenty-foot pole, because high schoolers are known to “watch up” — they watch what their older peers watch, and avoid anything that looks like it will talk down to them. Hence, we don’t really censor our humor, because frankly other TV for young adults doesn’t, either. Though our “educational” feel probably still hinders our reach. It’s a fine line to walk, and we’re always looking for feedback on how to (not) do it.

3) We here at The Media Show are huge fans of MST3K. This was sort of an odd description of how the show would work, as to my knowledge MST3K didn’t really work off of audience feedback — there was just the “invention exchange” at the beginnings between the characters of Joel and the ‘bots and the Mad Scientists. I guess I was really reaching for that show as a shorthand touchstone of what our show would feel like. In the last few filmings, there was a fan-made (by our own Rob Vincent) head of the robot Tom Servo on our set.

4) Willoby and Himrod were two dotty professor characters invented and developed by AfterEd before we came along. They were performed by Skye MacLeod and Josh Anderson, respectively. Both Skye and Josh helped out our show a lot as camera guys, script reviewers, animators, music writers, and in a hundred other ways; AfterEd was a collective production space. Weena actually appeared in an AfterEd weekly introduction bit with Himrod at one point, though that video appears not to be up online anymore, and Himrod appeared in an episode of The Media Show that was never finished because it was considered too preachy and boring.

5) Now, this is a major change. If you know Erna, you know “quiet” is just about the last word to describe her! In the end, Erna ended up being a lot more like Miss Piggy – dramatic, bossy, and self-confident. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s just how Abby stepped onto the stage and played her. Dramatically, it makes a lot more sense — it makes for bigger, funnier fights between the girls.

6) Everyone has historically had problems keeping the girls’ names straight, and I am apparently no exception. Weena wants to revolutionize media; Erna wants to revel in fan culture. Whoops! At the time, nobody caught it (doubtless because the names were too confusing).

7) Franz never really made it as a character, though we do refer to a bedwetting younger brother, Joé, in Get Outta Myspace. I think we may have been considering using the weird white humanoid puppet who appears in House Party as the brother at some point. That puppet was partly made by the woman who made Willoby and Himrod, a staff member at Teachers College; we finished him up. In other trivia, that puppet was also the original Hondo in the first staging of intern/Intern Nicola McEldowney’s musical Aisle Six, in 2009. We tended to refer to him as The Gimp.

Interestingly, we did eventually return to greenscreen, realizing it gave us more space and flexibility for big episodes like Red Shirt Revue and Where Spam Comes From. We got comments early on that our set in the closet (the show was, in fact, shot in a closet for most of the original episodes!) was too flat and too cluttered, so we did make changes. Recently, of course, we have been shooting in my living room, which sucks. We do not yet have enough lighting for reasonable greenscreen work. Hence the Kickstarter.

9)And that’s pretty much how things have gone, though the “wandering in” device didn’t really get used. It makes me kind of sad whenever I realize that despite my best aims of making this show something which people will encounter “in the wild” on YouTube primarily, and not in school, I still keep framing it in educational terms. I guess it goes with the territory of having developed the show at Teachers College, and having to deal with the demands of an institution like that.

10) I wish we’d managed to make this happen earlier on — we didn’t introduce show swag until the stickers in 2010 and the t-shirts this year.

11) The show first aired in the year Be Kind Rewind hit theaters, and many of us at AfterEd were jazzed about Michel Gondry’s idea of “sweding” or remaking movies on a low budget. I highly recommend the film for media literacy lessons!

12) This ended up being Selling You, which we didn’t get around to making until a fresh round of ads encouraging businesses to advertise on Bravo and Oxygen showed up in Manhattan in 2009. I was startled to find these ads in a subway station in Harlem, at 116th, where I was used to seeing crackheads; hence the note to myself on where to look for these ads for future reference. The appearance of these ads was, I figure, another symptom of the increasing gentrification of that neighborhood; there was a growing likelihood that high-rolling business owners or marketing types might be living nearby and using that station.

13) Many, many great ideas, some of which we’ve done, some of which we’ve refined, others of which fell by the wayside. We’re always experimenting with new formats, so some of these might yet get done. I’m totally still game to go interview a food photographer; they do some crazy things for their jobs!

14) Our scripting process has moved further and further from improvisation over time. While that has enabled us to be a little more firm in hitting “curriculum points,” I’m not sure that overall, it’s been a good thing. It’s possible we may return to improvisation a bit more in the next few episodes. One episode that was completely improvised, to good effect, was Weena Comes Out; as I remember it, we improvised it on our very first day filming, when the cameraperson du jour had stepped out for a second and we found ourselves with nothing to do.

Ever since we did the Hollister episode, I’ve been noticing people walking around New York with HCO SURF or HOLLISTER SOCAL or that seagull logo branded onto their clothes… and wishing I was some weird-looking old lady who could go up to them and mysteriously say, “THINNNGS are not what they SEEEEEEEEMMMMM!” and cackle and hand them a cryptic card that would have the link to our episode.

(Somehow all my fantasies about approaching people in New York City are based on my being old and weird-looking enough that the encounter would turn into this story they’d tell their friends about some crazy witch lady bent on incomprehensible revenge.)

Well, I’ve decided not to wait on shriveling up, or buying paste-on warts and a fright wig, to pull this off. I’ve made up cards with a link to the episode, and a QR code for those who just want to watch it right on their phone. I am actually going to go up to spaced-out-looking teenagers in Hollister gear and plant these cards on them. I am just that much of a pain in the ass.

AND I’m giving you the template for the Hollister cards as a PDF, so you can print some out too! Hand ‘em out at the mall; to your friends, enemies, or frenemies; plant them in teen magazines at the supermarket; etc. Let us know how it goes!

Cameraman Josh models the "Red Shirt Weena" shirt.

IN OTHER NEWS ABOUT CLOTHES AND SHOWS (and cornrows? shmeerinos?): If you’d like some other way to show your allegiance to Team Weena or Team Erna, check out the Media Show shirts for sale over at Etsy! If you don’t see your size or favorite color represented, let us know — we will be making more. We want your feedback, so we can clothe you in warmth sheaths* to your greatest customization and comfort.

As you may or may not be aware, some of us on the staff of The Media Show are big into the cult of Tommy Wiseau’s movie The Room, which we are ready to defend for the title of worst movie ever made. If you haven’t seen it, here’s an taste of the acting, writing, and terrible greenscreening which permeate the film (safe for work, if your workplace can take misogyny in stride):

(Oh, and if you haven’t seen it, we should also say that the first fifteen minutes of the movie contain probably the most awful sex scenes ever committed to film — so bad that one of our friends said after the first one that she was going to swear off men forever, after the second one that she was going to swear off sex forever, and after the third one that she had permanently lost her taste for chocolate. So yeah. This movie is Not For Kids. It might permanently warp them.)

Above all else, The Room is a long lesson in what not to do in a movie, a sort of film education in reverse. Don’t let one of your actors quit, then replace him with someone else without any explanation whatsoever. Don’t make every character say “Oh hi!” when they first enter a scene. Don’t use a handheld camera while doing greenscreen. Don’t overuse establishing shots, and don’t use establishing shots which have nothing to do with the scene you’re about to go into (exterior of a totally different building, etc.)

Anyway, we (well, Rob and Gus, anyway — Abby still wants to strangle us for making her watch it) have become so obsessed with the movie that we’ve started wondering what it would be like if different directors re-cut it.

You know. Quentin Tarantino’s The Room.

John Waters’s The Room.

Tim Burton’s The Room.

Peter Jackson’s The Room. (Would it be like Lord of the Rings, or Meet The Feebles? eeeeek.)

And so on. Would it turn out better? Could the story be saved from the megalomaniac man who produced it? Is there anything in this awful movie to be salvaged?

So, Dear Internets. Please help us realize this vision. Here is a short wish list of directors and auteurs (from various media!) who we would like to see re-cut The Room.

The Coen Brothers’ The Room
The Farrelly Brothers’ The Room
Robert Rodriguez’s The Room
Michael Bay’s The Room
Nora Ephron’s The Room
Michel Gondry’s The Room
Stanley Kubrick’s The Room
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Room
Lars Von Trier’s The Room
Don Herzfeldt’s The Room
Jim Henson’s The Room
Ingmar Bergman’s The Room
Maya Deren’s The Room

etc etc etc. You get the idea. Internets: pls to be delivering trailers.

Kthx.
The Media Show

Today, media and technology are changing so fast that not a day seems to go by without a huge, related headline:

• News International tapping phones to dig up dirt on politicians and celebrities.
• Facebook changing its privacy settings, yet again.
• Bookstores like Borders going out of business, while Apple’s liquid assets surpass those of the United States.

And yet, critical thinking about the media — often known as “media literacy” — has been edged out of school curricula. High-stakes tests pressure teachers to stick to rote memorization, reading, and math. Internet access is spotty or locked down at many schools, limiting what teachers can teach about online safety. Students may graduate without ever learning how advertisements provide the funding for most of their favorite shows, magazines, or websites.

The Media Show makes short online videos to take up the slack. We believe that when youth learn how the media and technology around them are made, they are empowered to think critically about the media messages they are immersed in.

Since 2008 we’ve used irreverent humor to explain copyright law, advertising tactics, email etiquette, and more on YouTube, the world’s most popular video site. In 2010, we won a Media That Matters award for our episode on photo manipulation throughout history — from Hitler airbrushing his enemies out of photos, through advertisers lightening pop star Beyonce’s skin color.

How can you help? The Media Show is currently seeking donors to fund not only production of upcoming episodes on search engines, online ads, and hacking, but also to support us as we take our shows to classrooms, libraries, and afterschool programs.

Would you help us? Participating Sponsors at the $650 level fund workshops in major US cities, as well as helping us reach young viewers online with brand new episodes.

Donors at the $1000 level help us do workshops in areas of the United States which are farther from centers of media production — places where youth are even less likely to be exposed to the workings of media and technology industries.

Time is running out on our campaign. Will you help us teach more young people to think critically about media systems?

Visit our Kickstarter campaign to learn how to support The Media Show. Here’s a list of the workshops we can offer, and here’s a little more about the show.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Gillian “Gus” Andrews
Producer, The Media Show
themediashow.net