IML Senior Thesis

Hello and welcome to all. My name is John Visclosky and for the past four years I have been an undergraduate student at the University of Southern California working towards attaining my Bachelor of Arts in Film/Television Production. For the same amount of time I have been a student at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML), a truly unique institution that operates within the Annenberg School of Communication. What the IML does is promote professional and educational growth through the use and mastery of various forms of multimedia communication including, but not excluded to, video editing software, garage band, videogaming software, second life, photoshop, and powerpoint. The point is to manipulate sound and image and to learn to combine them in new and interesting ways that expand our ideas about how to communicate.

Each IML student must design and successfully complete a Senior Thesis Project. Mine was to examine the newly minted multimedia genre of webisodes by creating my own webisode series. I wanted to learn by doing and show that the true mastery of any language -- whether verbal or technical in nature -- can only be demonstrated once a person has shown their capacity to not only understand said language but to use it in the creation of a new and original work. So I crafted "The Reunion," a six episode webisode series documenting one weekend in the fictional lives of a disfunctional troupe of siblings. I wrote, shot, starred in, and edited all six episodes before posting them all on the internet.

But that was only half the battle.

The other half of my project was to create a blog that would detail the creative process driving this webisode series, a blog that would examine "The Reunion" in close detail from inception to completion. But more than simply provide some sort of on-set diary, I want to use this blog to discuss the viability and longevity of this new multimedia genre. Do webisodes have a life beyond the present? Are they merely tools for entertainment or can they also act as sources of learning? And why do the most popular series always look like they've been shot over a single weekend using some poor schlub's cell phone camera? In this blog I seek to discuss and answer some of these questions, and present a few of my own. But don't worry. Just because the point of this blog is to facilitate lively discussion and learning doesn't mean it can't also be fun.

And that I can't share gross stories from the set. I mean, come on, who doesn't like those?