Movie Making -Tribute to Slumdog Millionaire

This week’s article gives me the opportunity to pay tribute to the movie SlumDog Millionaire-awarded by the Oscar Academy as the best film of the year 2008.

It was an amazing experience while watching the Oscar Award ceremony, heart started beating louder until the name of the best movie for the year 2008 was announced and yes it was “SlumDog Millionaire”. Almost whole of the cast and the crew was on the stage. What a team work!. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJRzk2WfOAo) Currently a lot of information about the movie is available on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slumdog_Millionaire. The readings this week and the victory of the movie has intrigued me to know more about movie making. I pondered on the similarities that exist between a movie making industry and organisations that are engaged in developing digital educational content. Both employ team work. Infact the positions and the responsibilities of team working for developing digital educational content share a lot of similarities with that of the movie making team. It will be interesting to compare and contrast the features of both the segments. Apart from the methods similarities exists between the tools that are used for example the videos. I think there is a lot of scope for instructional designers to learn from the process of movie making especially at this time when instructional designers are encouraged to become the architects of their design. Do the movie making industry use any development model?

Coming back to the reading this week which brings in light the important aspects and considerations for video based instructions I agree with the following quote “Video is comparatively expensive and difficult to develop, so it should only be used when it serves a specific instructional purpose, or enhances the likelihood of learning.” The process of developing a video is painstaking. There are many things we should know, when to use and how to use, videos are time consuming and very expensive. The phases of video development demand intense work. The tips and tools discussed in the reading makes one realise the considerations and tradeoffs to be done for keeping up with the quality and the medium of delivery. Therefore it is important to understand the need for the video based instruction before implementing it as a element of content. This belief matches with the second quote which says “Select video only when you can't accomplish the same thing with a still picture. It is truly amazing how much video material serves no instructional (or as far as we can tell, aesthetic) purpose.”