#2NextPrez Make Cycle: Breaking the Media with MediaBreaker

So, consider me intrigued … I just re-discovered the MediaBreaker tool by The Lamp as part of the Letters to the Next President campaign. MediaBreaker is like the old Popcorn Maker (I still miss you, Popcorn!) by Mozilla, in that you can layer media and text on top of video content. In this case, the idea is to make commentary on top of political videos.

I tested it out with a video from a Trump Supporter, and added some textual commentary as a counter propaganda move. I could not figure out how to publish/view the final edited MediaBreaker, nor how to create my own account in MediaBreaker itself (I did create a teacher account in its Studio). I did hit the “submit” button, so maybe it gets processed and reviewed before becoming public (I think that is the case). The MediaBreaker YouTube channel is here.

Ideally, the site would allow me to save and then kick out an embed code for sharing. But it doesn’t seem to do that. So, not only did I just lose all of my work (ack), I can’t share with anyone outside of MediaBreaker what I was doing. This may be intentional — a way to keep student work behind a “wall.”  (Students have to be 14 years old or older to use MediaBreaker so that counts my students out).

I like the possibilities of MediaBreaker, but it still feels a little funky and clunky to use. You have to download a video to your computer and then upload it into the editing tool. I am not sure if students can upload their own videos, or if they can only use what the teacher has uploaded. I wish the video being used could be native to the Web itself, as folks with slow Internet speeds will be left out of the remix possibilities.

Peace (in the breaking of the media),
Kevin