Foothill College Media Studies

03/25/2026

The Foothill Media Studies Dept has a special section MDIA 20, Fundamentals of Media Production running this spring '26. MDIA 20 is a core class for our Film TV Transfer A-ST degree. It also provides you gives you some great skills - everything from the ability to make your own You Tube channel or TikTok media campaign, to a shooting a short narrative film.

Next quarter Media faculty Amy Shidler has brought a great project to MDIA 20, students will be working directly with Hidden Villa, a 1,600-acre wilderness non-profit preserve and educational farm located just two miles from the Foothill campus. The class meetings are every Tuesday 1-4pm, alternating between on-campus technical skill building, and on-site production filming at Hidden Villa. If you are interested sign up right away, the class may be cancelled for low enrollment, we have all been too busy to get the word out - and this is a great opportunity!
For more info contact Amy at [email protected]

08/21/2020

an important article today in the NY Times about the history of the "Sapphire" stereotype and how it reverberates in media discourse today. We discuss this specifically in MDIA 8A, hopefully running winter 2021.

President Trump’s use of the word to describe Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, plays off a hurtful stereotype with a decades-long history.

03/04/2013

Interesting article, great show.

The time has come for us to consider the Hummingbird, a new television archetype.

03/04/2013

Press Release TOKYO, March 4, 2013—Canon Inc. announced today that the company has successfully developed a high-sensitivity 35 mm full-frame CMOS sensor exclusively for video recording. Delivering

01/23/2013

The other day after my on-campus class I sat down in the screening room and played the final scene of the film, the "forgotten man" number, just for myself. This is is the final scene of the film, a truly subversive ending and powerful I feel like sharing. I adore Joan Blondell, but also unforgettable is the solo by the uncredited actress Etta Moten Barnett. She died in 2004 at age 102, you can read her bio here: http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/05/local/me-barnett5

A quote about it from the article : "Barnett's role in the other film, "Gold Diggers of 1933," was a breakthrough for an African American actress, even though Barnett was not in the credits.

In it, Barnett sings a chorus of "Remember the Forgotten Man," a lament about World War I: "Remember my forgotten man/ You put a rifle in his hand/ You sent him far away/ You shouted, 'Hip, hooray!'/ But look at him today!"

Like the white actresses who also sing portions of this song, Barnett is posed glamorously in a window of a tenement house -- a character far from the maids or mammies that black actresses had been allowed to play up to that time.

"Here was a black woman who wasn't playing a servant, who wasn't fat, middle-aged or maternal in appearance, who was, indeed, sexy and glamorous and who sang a torch song rather than a Negro spiritual," the Chicago Tribune noted in a 1989 story about Barnett.

Barnett caught the attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who asked her to sing "Forgotten Man" for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's birthday party in 1934. Barnett was the first black woman to sing in the White House."

Here is a link to the scene if you would like to watchhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzMy7-7WV44

Happy Belated MLK Day!

10/22/2012

Grading discussions, watching the giants, grading discussions, watching the giants... :)

09/12/2012

We are gearing up for Fall 2012 ! Foothill Video and Media is offering a brand new film history course, fully online: VART 2A Film History 1895-1945. This class will inspire and give you a new understanding and love of cinema, how it has evolved and where it is headed. We will be studying many of cinema's great master directors including Georges Melies, DW Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor, Todd Browning, FW Murnau, Fritz Lang, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eise
nstein, Jean Vigo, Preston Sturges, and George Cukor. This course is transferable to both California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC)
Approved for CSU/UC IGETC Area 3A (Arts)
CSU GE Area C2 (Humanities).

RJ Ward is teaching Digital Video Editing (VART 30) and Web Video (VART 51).

The editing course covers Final Cut and Premiere Pro, though it isn't just a software course. Projects and course materials provide an in depth exploration of film grammar--the embedded language of camera angles and cuts-- that informs all media we see, from feature films, TV and documentary to commercials and corporate video.

Web Video focuses on production for the expanding world of streaming video. YouTube and Vimeo integrate seamlessly with Etudes, allowing for exploration of what works online, how to find your audience, and what the technical requirements are for best displaying your projects. The class functions as a laboratory for developing content to present on your own web channel.

Registration is already underway, and classes start September 24th. The cost is $31 per class unit (each of these courses are 4 units). What a deal! Students can register online: http://foothill.edu/admissions.php

07/20/2012

"Instead of agonizing over what grades they are going to get, I wish my students would be more concerned about the state of their learning. For a student who is truly focused on learning, the appropriate question to ask is not "How can I earn a better grade?" but rather "What do I need to learn that will enhance my academic performance?"
http://chronicle.com/article/GradingIts-Discontents/132789/

I like to think of college as a community of learners whose members are engaged in a common enterprise as well as a shared struggle against the forces of ignorance and complacency. Unfortunately, there's a serpent in this Garden of Eden. Potential for discord arises because some members of the commu...

07/18/2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/education/consortium-of-colleges-takes-online-education-to-new-level.html?smid=pl-share

Major universities are joining Stanford, Princeton and others to expand Coursera, a venture that offers free massive open online courses, or MOCCs.

06/27/2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimestech&seid=auto&pagewanted=all

A neural network of computer processors, fed millions of YouTube videos, taught itself to recognize cats, a feat of significance for fields like speech recognition.

06/27/2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/the-generation-gap-is-back.html

We are now a partisan country in many ways, but one dividing line — the generation gap — has been largely overlooked.