With barely any experience using Flash, the 64 first-year students in my Fall 07 Intermedia class courageously embarked on their first ever rotoscoping assignment. For three intensive weeks, we worked with a wild concert video featuring Girl Talk, which was shot and cut together by Brett Gaylor’s Open Source Cinema Project. The results are very gratifying indeed.

Sixty students doing an intro Flash assignment. The brief: get noticed.

Flicking through the pages of this month’s Communication Arts magazine – a special ten-year anniversary issue on interactivity – I was intrigued to find one of the award-winners described as being part of the “creative activist movement”. Wha? It turns out that the company, Say It Loud!, is a new ad agency that has simply adopted the visual and verbal rhetoric of protest, without any of the political commitments that that might imply. Worse still, the judges swallowed it whole:

“A virtual gathering place for design expressions from the creative activist movement, the site is as fresh as a spray-painted wall. Viewers can browse work, contact the creatives or post their own expressions.” “The camera movement on this site is interesting. There are also nice, punchy graphics and easy-to-access content. Very stylish.” says Grace Stanat; “Great animation of a flat-style illustration provides a lot of depth and motion.” says Sasha Kurtz.

Come on, people. Given the political climate we live in, I find it astonishing – yet gnawingly predictable – that something as depthless and critically unreflective as Say It Loud! can pass itself off as “creative activism” (whatever the hell that means). The fact that it took CA along for the ride just underscores the degree to which digi-chops trump ethical sensibilities every time. Does anyone remember “First Things First”?