Week 9 - Tutorial Task

Week 9 - Response to Content

Week 8 - Tutorial Task

Greetings!

We edited our trailer a bit:

We still need to find more music to go in there. 

 
it isn't that terrible...

Week 8 - Response to Content

Week 7 - Tutorial Task

Greetings!

We spent this lesson fine tuning the script and filming.

The plot has been chipped away at a bit, and we decided to make it known from the beginning that the protagonist’s husband has died. This way we can reveal it in the trailer. 
The rough plan for the trailer is to start mostly with words. We're planning to use a typewriter effect to play on the technology side of the story (since typewriters would probably be obsolete in the time our film is set). We picked a random year in the future, 2121, and it will appear on the screen, followed by a quick story being set up: Boy meet girl, they fall in love, get married. This text is interspersed with shots of the girl and boy meeting. 
Then tragedy strikes when her husband dies - cue sound effect of car crash.

A montage of scenes follows, showing her still communicating with him, and her family worried about her. We then explain how it's possible with the text: In a world where technology surpasses death. Eternal love is a reality.

Boy meets girl, they fall in love, love is lost.
or is it?

We're still working on the title.

Week 7 - Response to Content

Greetings!

Wikipedia is a great tool, despite the fact that it is not considered a legitimate reference point by scholars. While all information on the site is not accurate, it is a great way to get an basic idea of what something is. If you had to write about a particular topic, but didn’t know a thing about it, Wikipedia would be the place to go to inform yourself before doing in depth research. 

Originally Wikipedia was open to all people to edit freely, but it has since become necessary to set up and account with the site to become an editor. This is perhaps to deter those who just want to edit for a joke, rather than actually providing decent information.

I have edited Wikipedia, myself, twice. I have an account on Wikipedia, and it was very simple to sign up for it. The only thing I edited were small bits of information that were incorrect. I’ve never been the kind of person to intentionally ‘troll’ on the internet. Wikipedia itself describes a troll as “someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.” 

In Shachaf and Hara’s article on Wikipedia trolls, they quote Schwartz in his study of online trolls, “trolling will stop only when its audience stops taking trolls seriously” (Schwartz in Shachaf & Hara, 358-9). In his study he created an online discussion and introduced a troll. “The troll was successful in manipulating members’ ideologies into an intense conflict, which was one of the reasons that the members could not effectively ban the troll.”

Shachaf, P., Hara, N 2010, “Beyond Vandalism: Wikipedia Trolls”, Journal of Information Science, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 357 – 370.

Week 6 - Tutorial Task

Greetings!

Having been separated into groups, and given the task of creating a short film on New Com Tec, my group got to brain storming. 

I am in a group with Lauren (blog) and Jasmine, and our idea was a trailer for a romantic film. The basic idea of the film is inspired by an idea that we were introduced to in class that a feature on the internet can collect all posts a person has ever made on the net, compile it together, and create new posts that predict what they might say - even ater that person has died. The plot of our film is that technology has advanced so much and this feature has progressed so far that it has created a whole person out of someone's posts. A woman whose husband has died is still talking to him through the internet, and her family is worried about her. It has a bit of a Sixth Sense feel in that you don't reveal that he has been dead the whole time until the end.

Of course this is a trailer so we're not sure how we plan to get the message across without revealing the twist...

Week 6 - Response to Content

Greetings!

The evolution of cinema is a very interesting one. Dating back to the nineteenth century, cinema has developed from the introduction of the silver screen, to TV movies, to pirated copies online.

As modern technology develops and primarily rules a large fraction of population’s lives, almost everything has to bend to suit it. This includes the film industry, whether it be making films like The Social Network which deal entirely with technology, or understanding that, whether anyone likes it or not, pirated films will be on the internet. 

Focus on The Lion King, a movie originally released on the silver screen in 1994 – almost 100 years after the birth of cinema – is a time-old Disney classic. It was brought out on VHS, and became a component of homes all over the world, and loved by children of Generation Y. Years passed and The Lion King was released, remastered, on DVD. Not too long after that The Lion King would have been free to all who had internet and skills of prowess, and didn’t care that they were breaking the law, as a pirated copy online. This week The Lion King was re-released in 3D (cinema’s new ‘big thing’). It has been nearly twenty years since its release in cinema, and it has been available all of those years to view on DVD, or VHS if one was sentimental, or online. And yet millions of people will see The Lion King while it’s in the theatre. This is because while technology is causing the film industry to lose money it might get from sales, there is something comforting, if not nostalgic about seeing a long-loved film on the big screen. 

So while the film industry needs to understand that modern technology is a very powerful ruler, cinema will never die.