Create a short (5 min. max.) video with found footage. You can appropriate images from mass media - movies, television, music videos, CNN, home-shopping network, etc., or use yours or other's home movies. Your audio could be music, voiceover, appropriated/found sound, or a combination of these audio sources.

Slash/videos: (often called "Song Tapes") are made by fans of sci-fi TV shows and films such as Star Trek. The practice of "slashing" was developed by middle-aged female trekkies, where they re-wrote and/or invented scenarios with stock characters (e.g. Kirk/Spock - K/S) but with meanings and relationships that are absent from the show. (e.g. K/S as homosexual lovers) The popular practice of "slashing" - these female fans are not trained media artists - is a good example of how the meaning of images from mass media can be manipulated through low tech but skillful means.

In your video, think about how re-editing the footage and/or re-dubbing your video sources with different audio tracks can create new meaning for the images you are working with. Your tape can be a commentary on the images, a collage of different sources, and/or a re-presentation of a familiar scene in which hidden meaning is brought to the surface through your re-arrangement of its shots. You must alter the meaning of the source footage for this assignment.

Process:

1..	Begin collecting found footage for the project;
2..	Black a DV tape and transfer the footage onto it. This is now your source tape;
3..	Create a project in FinalCutPro (FCP), assigning scratch disks, folders, etc. for your project;
4..	Log your source tape in FCP;
5..	Digitize source footage on to harddrive using FCP;
6..	If you are making a music video, import sound track and lay it down as a foundation for the video footage;
7..	Please limit your edits to straight-cuts only for this assignment;(no special effects)
8..	You are expected to use this project to learn how to operate the editing system to combine a sequence of images; (i.e. no one-take videos!)
9..	When you have completed your video, print at least two copies onto separate DV tapes. One will be your master tape, which you will store in a safe place, and the other will be your submaster, which you will hand in and use for screening, making dubs, etc.

*Copy protection: some videos nowadays (especially the popular movies distributed by big studios) has an electronically doctored signal, so that when you try to copy or edit with it, the footage turns out really degenerated. (really dark, bad signal, etc.) If you want to use a video that has copy protection, you are allowed to re-shoot the images off a monitor screen. Same with DVDs.

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