The Skinny on the Media Show

The Media Show – a show produced by EdLab’s video team that came out of the After Ed TV project, and a product of Gus Andrews’ imagination – recently won the Fair Use Award at the Media that Matters Festival (see the posting here). The particular episode that won the award (above and on youtube) is a look at the use of Photoshop in advertising, and a short history of image manipulation. Here’s Gus’ description of the show and the episode:

The Media Show is a YouTube channel series staring puppets Weena and Erna, two high-school-aged sisters skipping school to spend time making their own videos in an abandoned storage closet in an advertising agency in New York City. The show’s model of media literacy aims to reconcile the exuberance of fan-created media with a critique of ad-driven corporate media.

In this episode of The Media Show, My Hotness is Pasted on Yey!, Weena and Erna happen across a terrible graphics job in Cosmopolitan, leading them to the website Photoshop Disasters, which gets them thinking about other photo manipulation throughout history. Stalin, Hitler, OJ Simpson, Beyoncé—who hasn’t been touched by photo alteration in some way? The girls explore art and propaganda and end up playing with Photoshop themselves, taking control and manipulating their own appearance.

Perhaps even more exciting than the development and grow of the YouTube-based show, is a case study Gus has developed for using The Media Show in schools (see the Pressible site). We hope this will create an inroad for using these video resources in new and interesting ways.

For example, earlier this spring Gus worked with students at a Brooklyn High School using The Media Show to support a media literacy curriculum about advertising. Skye Macleod supported this collaboration and helped produce videos about the experience (see them here and here).

We’ll showcase the case study in the next few months on the EdLab website, and look forward to talking with educators (and others!) with an interest in this resource.

See more on the history of The Media Show here.