The next assignment was to record sounds, and we (Jonathan and myself) organized the whole thing quite efficiently. We met for about 20 minutes to focus on ONE idea, since as usual each one of us had an idea. Then we assigned the different “scenes” that each one will record, and remembering the experience from last week, we had A LOT of different takes, each of them quite long as well, to be able to have enough material to work with.

We recorded each of the needed sounds while we did our everyday life. This has proven to be the most time - efficient assignment so far.

When the time came to show our movie in the class, it turned out that we haven’t exported our movie correctly. Thus, we couldn’t present it when we should but after the break.

It was well taken by the class in general, and the comments / critique was mostly directed towards establishing more solidly how the two main characters are different, without going back and re shooting the whole thing. The suggestions included shooting the H& O’s fan watching one of their videos for a while, as well as shooting various of their posters. The same treatment should be used for the guy who was a Terror Movie Fan.

During the presentation, we also talked about the main obstacles we encountered and there was another group who had happened upon similar difficulties (such as watching the scenes immediately after shooting them).

Since it was our first time ever tackling editing, and shooting as a matter of fact, we found out that it was the worst idea ever to look at what we have filmed immediately after filming it. That is, because we rewound and played each of the various takes of each of the scenes we have filmed (personally out of curiosity and excitement of filming our first movie) we have left some seconds between each of the takes, which made it very tricky to get the footage onto Final Cut Pro. We had help from Marianne, which happened to be around, and by-passed that first obstacle. I learned that we should NOT look at each scene after shooting it. Just make sure to shoot it several times, so some of it would be good.
The second obstacle was that I looked at the camera immediately after the scene to say “cut”, and it was quite difficult to edit it correctly so that that particular gesture did not appear on the final movie. At the end we managed, but I learned that we have to “keep on rolling” for about a minute as well as give some space at the beginning of each scene for editing purposes.
The final obstacle was finding the appropriate music for the whole film. We were able to find a way of totally “silencing” the park scene (extremely loud when we first shoot it) and record the music over; but it took a LONG while to be able to take the music out of Zannah’s iPod, and get it into the computer.
Finally, writing the introducing credits and end credits took longer than expected, but we were all really happy with the final product, since it is funnier every time we watch it.

In spite of the fact that none of us are actors, when the question arose in class about WHO was going to act we decided that we were going to do it ourselves. When we meet to distribute the scenes and so on, we found out that it was going to be very tricky to be able to film both stories. This due to lack of enough actors for all the roles and also to time constrains. So, we decided that we were going to focus on ONE story, and distributed the various roles amongst ourselves: camera, sound, lights, location finder and actors and directors. We had to re-draw, or rather, enlarge the storyboard, to accommodate this new development.

It was a lot of fun to alternate between all the roles, and it was much more time consuming that I ever expected. It took us all Saturday to have about 5 minutes worth of tape, most of them between two and four takes of each scene. By the end of that Saturday we were tired and happy with our work.

We got together as a group (Jonathan, Thomas, Zannah and myself) and brainstormed about the various ideas we had for our first three – minute movie. We had two main concepts, and discarded one of them because it would be really difficult to film specially regarding locations and actors (children were involved).
We focused on the second idea: leaving a personal note in a book that someone else took, and started working on it. It developed into two parallel stories:

• The first one was about a guy who loved Hall & Oates, draw a picture of them, and bookmarked what he was reading with it. After colliding with another person who also happened to be reading the same book, his girlfriend found out a ticket for horror films (which he disliked) and treated him to one. He had nightmares about it.
• The second story was about the guy who liked horror movies. A friend of his, upon finding the Hall & Oates drawing (from the original guy) gave him a H&O t-shirt as a Birthday Present.

We divided the work so two different people worked on each of the Story Boards. We also emailed each other regarding the story line we have discussed, to make sure that everybody involved was clear on what the story was. Our “final product” can be found here storyboards.

This is our (Sandra’s and mine) animation storyboard. Enjoy!

So, I came to ITP because I want to construct something. The more I am here, the more I believe my original vision was onto something, which just needed a lot of polishing. This is being done on a constant basis, and it is slowly coming together.

I intend to build a mono – seat public bus, basically a ride, that will, to a certain extent mimic any of the ones that you find daily on the streets of Lima. The behavior of these small transport units, according to sociologists amongst others, describes the culture .

The installation itself will consist of a seat, hooked up accordingly to “shake” which will “call” you when you go by it, as the person who collects the money (“cobrador”  we call it) inside the bus does in Lima. Besides the main seat itself, the installation will consist of three screens:

• The first screen, situated on the right hand side of the person will show “images and sound” of the street they are going through.
• The middle screen, smallest and right in front of the user (or perhaps even a “control panel”, which will be my laptop basically) will show the route, through a MAP. A little bus moving through the screen as it passes by the streets, and as it happens in Lima, you can make it stop whenever you want. There will be a microphone supplied for that.
• The third (and last) screen, located on the left side, will give “web” information, through a link (or links) or actual charts constructed from scratch in case there is no web information available.

To make the experience more “realistic”, people should “pay” for their ride, by depositing a coin on an appropriate place. This will be “asked” of them once they enter. Of course, once they are done, the money will be returned to them.

I envision that this device, or “interactive art piece”, will serve at least three purposes, and will be directed to two main audiences (to begin with):

1.    For Lima dwellers:
It will serve to allow people of the city of Lima who happen to get on a bus everyday experience the city in a completely different way. Hopefully, it will:
•    Show people what a map looks like, allowing them to get comfortable with them.
•    Inspire people to look for different things when they travel on the bus; in a sense, allowing new ways to look at the city.
•    Familiarize people with statistics: What do they mean? What can we really do with numbers? So, that’s what happens every time I answer a survey / census?
•    This will hopefully make math, and specifically statistics simple, nice, friendly, meaningful and useful in everyday life beyond the common use in exchange rate and basic counting of things.
In a sense, this will feel like a documentary on-the-go experience, were things are being explained as they go through there, hopefully within a historic perspective, so people will never look at the things they see daily as “common place” again.
Eventually, and to allow people who can’t get o the installation experience some of it, the videos will be uploaded to youtube and / or the pictures to flicker, since people have a lot of access to the internet.

2.    For people who do NOT live in Lima:
2a.     “Experiencing the ride”. It will give them a glimpse of what it means to travel in a third world city of 8 million inhabitants, were a great number of us believe that the Law is there to twist and bend within an inch of itself. Uncomfortable seats. Blazing music. Random turnabouts by the driver, whenever he feels like it. And varying fees if you know how to ask for it.
2b.     Finding more about what they are seeing / experiencing. Based on the same information and footage that Lima Dwellers have used, these will have a deeper and more contextualized display of possible explanations of WHY things are as they are, in a historical socio-economic perspective. It could be used as a vehicle of letting possible donors and other people interested in working / aiding / knowing more about what a Latin American third world country big city looks like and what to expect when traveling to it (or when wanting to “help” it). People’s brains just work differently.

Contrary to what I felt while reading his first chapter – in terms of his ability to “see” the future, since I felt that he was referring to the internet he whole time, when such a notion perhaps did not existed while he was writing his book – I think this second chapter is outdated.

For one, I believe that the radio’s survival in the face of the Television and other such entertainment devices is due to its ability (as the television never could) to allow an immense amount of interaction with the listener, at a relatively small cost for this. They just need a telephone – or even an email account, which is not the same as a computer – to be able to get their message through. And sometimes, broadcast their own voice in real time, which will make the radio host urge the person to “turn down the volume, please”.

I believe that many of the television shows with higher ratings – such as the “reality shows” – are, in part, so popular, because they allow that input from the final recipient. Which in turn, feel that they have a small measure of power in the outcome of said show.

Thus, using McLuhan’s definition of hot and cold media, I believe that the trend now is towards “cooling” it. In fact, in some cases the medium survival will depend on how much it interacts with its objective public, and how fast it responds to it.

Accepting as fact that whatever we put between ourselves and other people not only shapes our relation to said other people but also the relation we have with ourselves, then we can infer that said contraptions trigger our imaginations, since we are now able to do things that before we only dreamt about.

That being said, I believe it is important to remember that the realm of these possibilities are circumscribed to what each individual is capable of imagining, positively correlated with his or her particular situation in life. Since the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs it is important to consider what and where are the state of human affairs when this medium is introduced. Take the internet, for example, as the newest medium to entrench itself within our midst. One which has come to stay.

Enhancing my comments posted under the title “Wider micro payment considerations” in this blog, the way many people in Peru – particularly those from poorer social strata, which very grossly accounts for up to 70% of a population of roughly 22 million inhabitants – had “embraced”, or not, social networking is completely different as what is happening in New York, from my very limited experience of living here for the last 65 days.

In Peru it is just a piece of entertainment, and it is very marginally related with those who are the really important people in that person’s life. For that, we have “real life”, and incredibly vast extended family (think “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) and many friends, and their families, we go and meet personally. The people “in the internet” are contained in that medium, and only become “alive” in the period people devote to “meet” them there. In some cases, it can even represent an escape route or a peak into “modernity”, “prosperity” and the like. Very, very different from real life.

So, in no way “one size fits all” in this new mediated era, and McLuhan’s example of the railway, and how good it was whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, made me recall that the railway wasn’t exactly a success in Peru, when it was proving to be a boom, and “the road o development” in many other places. And that happened because of the Andes. It was all good and well for flat countries, but many people (including the American Engineer who thought it was the best idea ever to come to my country) lost fortunes when trying to apply an “already tested and successful industry” in a very different place. It worked quite poorly because of the peculiarities and characteristics of the country. And the same is happening with many things that are being introduced. They just adapt, mutate, transform to the new conditions, sometimes resulting in a completely different thing.

Because of free will, amongst a series of other things like personality, literacy level and so on, people will take what exists out there and make it their own. So, most times not only we cannot dictate how a certain media is going to be used, we cannot even predict what could happen. As with the internet itself. As it already happened with the written word and how it shapes and encapsulates (or not) the society it underwrites, like the example given to this purpose in the book that compared England, the United States of America and France.

Although this really has nothing to do with the way micropayments were defined and understood by both Shirky and McCloud, I couldn’t stop thinking about them in a wider context.

Therefore, in this w i d e r  context, these smaller than small payments for services, that could not be acquired otherwise (such as internet or cellular telephones) do work quite well. At least in Peru, they have allowed a whole “industry” to flourish, that of internet and “cel-phones” booths.

This is how it works. The “minimum wage” is around 200 dollars a month, which makes it impossible to pay for a computer, let alone the monthly internet tariff. Of course you can always steal that, but that is another discussion. For the sake of argument - and simplicity - lets just assume that people will want to pay for an internet tariff. They just will not be able to.

So, seeing that accessing this technology was a “need” for the majority, someone though of these booths as a solution. These are basically indoors spaces were the owners have crammed together between twenty and thirty computers, and they rent the hour of internet use (or general computer use) to whoever happens to pass by. You can also print your work at an specific charge per page too. Internet rent is on average 30 cents of a dollar per hour, which makes it accessible to most. It has actually become most people’s (specially teenagers in impoverished areas) main source of entertainment.

The same had happened with cel - phones, although they charge by minute (Peru is one of the most expensive countries regarding telephone tariffs), and the type of service differs. There are both booths and “on the go” cel-phones, i.e. you literally have people with their cel phones on the streets, offering a certain rate to be able to access the service.

So what about privacy? It is basically non - existent, but nobody really cares that much about it, but just about getting the call made, the email sent and you can continue with your business.

Again, and relating to my previous post, the bottom line is what is in people’s mind at the time they are engaging in the transaction; what they are willing to pay or not pay (not only monetarily, but in time, convenience, and so on) for accessing that particular service at that precise point. What they are comfortable with, what is their own definition of “ownership” and so on and so forth.

Thus, I think that there is a LOT more to micropayments than the uses for internet content, and these are just some examples of what is already going on, at least in Peru.