52 Seconds

Film is a collaborative art. So is teaching. In an effort to lace my film syllabus with an unexpected challenge or two, I googled "film, syllabus, soviet" and was lucky enough to find a good idea by my colleague Yuri Leving, who teaches at Dalhousie University in Canada, and I quickly plugged it into my own nascent course. (Thanks Yuri -- and feel free to mine mine!) The good idea: a 52-second film, exactly the length of the Lumiere brother's first efforts, to be shot with whatever is on hand -- a cell phone, a macbook, a borrowed camera. I made the assignment optional and gave my students a week to put their projects together, but got a great collection of responses, from eccentric cats to a sunset-disco montage. Here is an especially impressive time-lapse, shot and edited by Tristan Loucks and featuring San Diego's Seaport Village.