Leigh Wolf and Ken Dirkin, instructors in the year III of the MAET program in Plymouth have been assigning, what they call, Quick Design assignments. These are quickfire challenges for students to showcase their talents under pretty severe constraints (of time, software to be used, final result desired and so on). Over the past four weeks students in the program have been forced to complete a range of such assignments.

Well, yesterday the tables were turned. The students gave the instructors a quick design assignment. I am not exactly sure how I got caught in this since Leigh and Ken were the two people most responsible for putting the students through these “create under pressure” scenarios … but be that as it may, we were given on hour to create an original video (less than 2 minutes in length) around the theme of Convincing faculty of the use of technology.

All I can say is that an hour goes by fast!! But we did finish our video in time (and it is included below).

As important as the video is just what went into making it. The overall idea comes from a commercial from monster.com (see that here). The images are all from photographs taken by the three of us (which we picked off from our respective Flickr sites), the music is original, composed right then and there by Ken using HobNox (an online music synthesizer) and edited using iMovie on Leigh’s Mac. In fact that the only stumbling block was the new version of iMovie, which has some non-conventional interface issues (to put it mildly). Anyway it was done in time.. so here it is, enjoy: