Dan Gurskis is the writer of The Short Screenplay: Your Short Film from Concept to Production. He is Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Film Department at Brooklyn College-CUNY in New York. He received his B.A. from University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brandeis University.

Dan is a member of the Writer's Guild of America and an Emmy-Award Winner, Cable Ace Nominee, Shubert Fellow, and MacDowell Colony Fellow. He is a screenwriter, playwright, producer, director with over 40 credits in feature films, telefilms, episodic television, and the theater and has worked for Columbia, Paramount, RKO, HBO, ABC, Showtime, Cinemax, and the USA Network.

To the video production students: now is your chance to ask Dan questions about working as screenwriter in the industry, specific questions you have about his book and how it relates to your crew's script, or general screenwriting questions to pick his brain. Please keep your questions short and to the point and he will do the best he can to answer them over the next week.

In the media production and design and time-based media courses, the first assignment entailed either altering a single photograph and changing its context or create a triptych where tools in Photoshop may be used to connect the three images.

As you can probably imagine, Photoshop is a great tool for the creation and alteration of images but there are also ethical considerations when the content involves reality, such as a war, and perceptions of that reality are forever changed in the minds of one's audience who may not know the image has been altered at all.

Here are two examples:

Katie Couric has lost a few quick pounds instantly with the help of Photoshop (you'd think someone would notice when she was on TV that week looking heavier that the jig was up!). This altered photo appeared in a promotional magazine for CBS.



Image courtesy of the NY Times (be sure to check out their article, Ease of Alteration Creates Woes for Picture Editors, registration required). The first 2 images were taken by Photojournalist Brian Walski for the LA Times while he was in Iraq. The last image was the composite he made using the two images.


There are certainly many more examples than this. Our entire celebrity culture is based on creating perfection. Is there something to gain in this ability to edit and alter images or is it appearing to be lose-lose? What is your thinking on this, know that you have a better understanding of Photoshop?

Also check out this Dove video, to further the discussion of ethics involved in alteration and our concept of beauty:

Get the facts because this concerns us all as media producers, entrepeneurs, and citizens!

Moyers on America: The Net at Risk
Wednesday, October 18 at 9:00PM on WGBH 2

"The future of the Internet is up for grabs. Big corporations are lobbying Washington to turn the gateway to the Web into a toll road. Yet the public knows little about what's happening behind closed doors where the future of democracy's newest forum is being decided. If a few mega media giants own the content and control the delivery of radio, television, telephone services and the Internet, they'll make a killing and citizens will pay for it. America's ability to compete in the global marketplace, the unfettered exchange of ideas online, and broadband services that could improve quality of life for millions are at stake. Some say the very future of democracy itself may hang in the balance. In "The Net at Risk," Bill Moyers and journalist Rick Karr report on the wannabe "lords of the Internet" and examine how promises by the big tel-co companies of a super-high speed Internet in return for deregulation and tax breaks have gone unfulfilled while the public has paid the price. After the documentary, Moyers leads a discussion on media reform to explore the real-world impact of deregulation on communities and citizen participation in democracy."

Watch it!