Author Study Project

Presented by Seniors in The Great Books (ADV English) class at Cary Academy. Click on the Author's Portrait to view a one-minute streaming video designed to portray the essence of an author's life and work.
To prepare for this project students read a biography of a favorite writer, choosing from a master List and a major work by that writer. (Read the Project Description.) Students chose a key passage from the work that typifies the writer's interests and style, and also found or wrote themselves a short passage that helps to explain the author's passion. They viewed a Demo video prepared by our Media Technology teacher, Mr. Hamilton, to get video design ideas. Then they incorporated their ideas and passages into a one-minute video using a variety of state-of-the-art computer technologies, including digital image processing (using Adobe Photoshop), sound effects and music (using Acid Music), voiceover recording (using Sound Forge), and video image processing (using Adobe Premiere). The projects were graded on how well the short videos communicate the essence of the author the student studied.
Go to Class of 2004 Student Videos
Go to Class of 2005 Student Videos     (2005 links will not work until Dec 16 2004)
Go to pictures and student comments about the project

Alphabetical Listing of Authors and Works

Isabel Allende House of Spirits 1  Daughter of Fortune
Maya Angelou  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings    I Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Jane Austen  Northhanger Abbey   Pride and Prejudice
J. M. Coetzee  Disgrace
Countee Cullen Color
Charles Dickens Hard Times
Emily Dickenson The Complete Poems
Fyodor Dostoyevsky  Crime and Punishment
T. S. Eliot  The Waste Land and Other Poems
Robert Frost  The Complete Poems
Lorraine Hansberry  A Raisin in the Sun
Nathaniel Hawthorne  The House of Seven Gables
Joseph Heller Catch-22   Something Happened
Lillian Hellman Watch on the Rhine
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises 1   The Sun Also Rises 2
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1        A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 2
Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis and Other Stories   The Trial
Jack Kerouac  The Subterraneans
Ken Kesey  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Steven King  Carrie
C. S Lewis The Screwtape Letters            'Til We Have Faces
Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
Frank McCourt  'Tis
Herman Melville Moby Dick
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
Joyce Carol Oates  Rape: A Love Story
Tim O'Brien Going After Cacciato
George Orwell 1984    Animal Farm
Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar
Edgar Alan Poe The Complete Stories
Alexander Pushkin  Eugene Onegin
Edward Said Orientalism
William Shakespeare Macbeth
Mary Shelley Frankenstein
Leslie Marmon Silko  Ceremony
John Steinbeck East of Eden 1                 East of Eden 2
Tom Stoppard  Arcadia
Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels
Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club
James Thurber The Thurber Carnival
J. R. R. Tolkein The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings     The Lost Lore of Middle Earth
Leo Tolstoy Master and Man
Mark Twain Huck Finn
John Updike Rabbit, Run
Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five
Alice Walker The Color Purple
Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Ernest
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse