http://itp.nyu.edu/~acb363/commlab/blackbird/
This was much more difficult than I anticipated. The Flash was certainly a component, but trying to tell a story without using words was an even greater challenge. I think I managed to make a decent rough sketch of the story, I now need to go in and add the details to communicate the full story.
Without Hearing
- add variety of lighting "rings" to distinguish callers
- strengthen vibrate
Without Vision
- braille on keypad
- more auditory instructions, options for setting preferences
Without Ability to Use Hands
- better speaker phone capabilities
- more auditory instructions
there's a new site selling downloadable comics for 99¢:
http://www.pullboxonline.com/
Here's my storyboard. I've never worked with flash so some of these may not be as fully animated as I envision. I've written a story to include the copy, because i don't think my animation/drawing skills are to the point that I can really convey this story just in images. As Frank in "Motherless Brooklyn" says, "before you wanna be scarface, you gotta wanna be scabface."
Here's the story:
black bird loved to fly.
his friends could always find him floating above the clouds.
he had won the annual flying marathon three years in a row.
everyone was proud of their local champion.
one day black bird was flying and was struck by tragedy.
he left the hospital in tears. would he ever fly again?
he swallowed his grief and began to work. his one wing would need to be stronger to do the work of two.
black bird shocked everyone at the marathon. not only could he fly again, but take first place. he was still a champion.
when he held his trophy he forgot his arm's new strength and accidentally broke it in two.
he was devastated. he had worked so hard to prove that he was the same black bird.
the other black birds' words of comfort could not reach him.
he flew far away, well into the night.
he felt better after flying for so long and began to head home.
he ran into the other black birds who held a surprise. they had repaired his trophy and fixed the wings so he could hold it.
black bird was not the same black bird, but he was still a champion.
I agree with the logic behind micropayments, but until there's a more cohesive payment system online, it just creates a roadblock to content which seems petty with a smaller amount. I would be pretty annoyed if I had to create a log in, enter all of my personal information, verify, all to give an artist 5¢ for viewing their work. I wouldn't mind if it were a one time registration and from there on a simple click, similar to itunes. Maybe publishers could get together and create as single online payment system that you can join and then use seamlessly on all of their sites.
My favorite online revenue model is salon.com. They give readers the choice between viewing an advertisement for a few seconds, or paying a subscription fee and view the site ad-free. I think it's a nice solution that doesn't alienate different users. The only problem with this is that a lot of independent artists have smaller audiences and can't attract advertisers - or have content of which advertisers may be weary.
Ultimately, I think users will contribute to worthwhile content online. The main problem now, is making it easier to purchase than it is to pirate.
We all agreed on a loose story for our video shoot, which gave us a pretty concise set of shot lists. We wanted to be able to improvise shots as we found them and possibly use some found footage interspersed between the main story line. The whole video was pretty abstract, so that gave us much more freedom. We only needed the following key shots and focussed on those: dean being woken by death, dean and death playing chess, dean winning, death moving the chessboard, dean running.
The video was shot in Baeck's apartment. We met in the afternoon so the natural light was sufficent and we didn't make much use of the lighting kit at first. However, it started to get darker, so we played around with the lighting and that's how we discovered the shadows. We decided to film the running sequence using that, which was a relief because Dean was understandably hesitant to be running outside in his pajamas, as initially planned.
We borrowed a camera from school, but Baeck preferred to use his and already had a tape. He did most of the filming, we all helped direct the shots.
After we finished shooting, we came back and started digitizing the film. The editing was split between us all, although Dean managed to get a lot of it done on his own. He also composed some original music for the video, which fits really nicely. We had a lot more footage than we initially planned because we improvised quite a bit on the shoot: the shadows sequence, dean wandering through the hallway, the city shots. We hadn't been to Baeck's apartment beforehand, but found pretty ingenious ways to take advantage of the space/location. Once we had compiled all of the footage, we had a full sequence and decided to scrap the previous random images/footage idea - it would be too overwhelming, and long.
Once the editing was complete, we created the DVD in idvd and agreed upon a title. Initially we wanted it to be "exit" in French. Much to our chagrin, exit in French is "exit." Someone from another group recommended exit in Latin - "exunt" - and we all agreed.
I think we had a good approach in keeping a very simple story line that allowed for a lot of abstraction. We had a pretty limited timeframe and if we had too many required shots, we couldn't have gotten it done in time. All in all, I'm really happy with the way it came out. It's a bit dark, but in some parts pretty moving.
I'm working with Yasmin, Baeck and Dean - we all agreed upon doing a loose rendition of the famous scene from Seventh Seal where the main character plays chess with death. Here's our storyboard and shot list:
First attempt:
Power Puff Girls Intro | "Girls" by the Beastie Boys --> Power Girls
Second attempt:
Louis Jordan "Is You or Is You Ain't My Baby" | Miles Davis "Bags Groove (Take 1)" --> LuvSong
I really wanted to use a snippet from a t.v. show, particularly "Murder She Wrote." I managed to find a video of the intro on YouTube, then discovered this site. Unfortunately, without a plug-in, there's no way to export the audio only from an flv.
So ... Then I searched for other tv show intros that maybe I could find in mp3 format and discovered this site. The audio quality is pretty shoddy, but fun to play with.
I got this avenging unicorn set for my birthday last year and when we got assigned a stop motion immediate wanted to do something with it. I chose to work with someone outside of the class because I had such a strong idea of what I wanted to do and couldn't imagine compromising.
The story line pretty much came out of the box. We drew the town scenery the night before and borrowed a friend's camera. The story was shot on my boyfriend's kitchen table with natural light. In retrospect we should have used artificial light because the room got darker and the shots are pretty inconsistent because of that.
I did the editing in iMovie, which is pretty intuitive. The song came to mind after the fact and magically fit perfectly with the timing - just some minor tweaking. I found the screams and car wreck sounds here. The galloping is included with iMovie.
I was pretty amazed at how well it came out - neither of us have any experience with stop motion. When I have time, I'd like to go back and clean up the shots. I also need to remove the wound from the mime in the shots before the impaling. A few people have noticed that after a few views.
I received the Good vs. Evil unicorns for Thanksgiving and am thinking of a sort of "Batman Begins" prequel, where we learn the reasoning behind the seemingly senseless tirade of the unicorn. The possibilities are endless ... :-)
We found this image on google images and added the faces, changed it all to greyscale and added the skywriting ...
PSD:
Link to PSD
Originals:
This article points out an interesting change with our perception of art with the ability to duplicate many of the artisitc mediums currently used. Or rather, if the "original" is merely the means to create duplicates, what is the original, and what value can it contain?
It's intersting to think of art in terms of its "aura" and I definitely agree with the author that this is greatly diminished by modern mechanical reproduction. I think this has less to do with the aura in terms of authenticity, as in the cult that the author describes, but more in terms of historical proximity. For example, first edition books are highly prized because they bring the reader closer to the author in terms of time, not necessarily because they are more accurate or "original" reproductions. The exact same manuscript can have a very different value based solely on the date it was printed, even if it is further from what the author intended, simply because of its historical significance.
Emily Dickenson's poems were initially published with proper punctuation instead of the dashes she used when writing. Although those first editions are far from what she intended (or the original), they have a high value because of their connection to the period of time in which she was writing. Although those editions are the original print, they are not the original piece of work.
I don't think it's possible to calculate degrees of originality, so work increasingly has external factors that give it additional worth. This is evident in the recent trend toward limited production, autographed pieces and first-edition collectibles. Worth has increasingly been attached outside of the realm of the pieces themselves to maintain the type of cult status as older works.
When he writes about architecture and a distracted audience, I immediately thought of graffiti. It's very similar to painting in the materials used and it's ability only to occupy a finite space with a definite original, but very similar to architecture and film in it's attempts to attract a distracted audience. This made me further question the aura the author describes. The examples of paintings he uses are all paintings held in areas that demand quiet contemplation -- churches and museums. If Raphael had painted his works on the side of a building in Rome, would viewers approach them with the same reverence? Do paintings still have their aura, or is it only attached through historical and cultural signficance?
When I went to the Uffizi in Florence, I saw a lot of paintings that I'd only seen before in books. Although I was standing in front of the original, I couldn't help but compare the pictures I'd seen to the real one in front of me. In some way, the photos seemed more "real" than the paintings themselves. The colors weren't as vibrant, they were larger than I expected -- the original somehow became the original way I had encountered the paintings in photographs. To be honest, some paintings I preferred in the photographs I'd seen.
Managed to locate the background for the nav and align the entries w/the top of the nav ... changed the colors a bit ... still a work in progress:
- more space between photos and copy
- better blog header
- better nav layout
- interior pages - re-layout
Kate Moss sharpened ...
You can see from the background and edges of her shirt that this photo has been drastically sharpened to make her appear unattractive.
strphrd photos altered
This is an annual event where people strip for charity that I company I previously worked for would host. The photos are pretty drastically altered from the orignals. One of the female designers actually refused to airbrush the women, so the founder had to do it. There was a lot of debate on these photos. A lot of us felt that shouldn't be altered, but some were concerned that the participants would be upset by less than perfect images of themselves on the site.
Mariah Carey: airbrushing live
NBC article
This is a weird phenomenon - airbrushing people instead of images.
It's hard to describe my process for re-designing this blog, because there wasn't much of a process involved. It was a lot of trial and error ...
I mainly used Firefox's css editor plug-in, which enabled me to see my revisions immediately, with no fear of overwriting any real documents. I would make revisions in the editor and when I reached a good point, save to a text file to later upload to the site.
LAYOUT
The first thing I wanted to do is move the navigation to the left-hand side of the page. It seemed more intuitive to me and leaves the far right column for further additions. This had to be switched around in the Index page, which was a bit confusing because MoveableType renames their columns: alpha, beta, gamma - not the most intuitive. (Why not col 1, col 2, col 3?) I also wanted to move the navigation items around a bit. It seemed silly to have a search button at the top of the nav with only two entries, so I pushed it to the bottom.
DESIGN
The only design elements I changed were with the colors. I've had a recent affinity for lime green, so I tried to incorporate that early on. It doesn't always play well with others, particularly on a copy-heavy site so I had to scrap it pretty quickly. I found a compromise with the yellow-green used for the header and found a background that would complement it and be soft enough to read the copy on. I'm still not happy with the way it looks and want to play around w/the lime green a bit more. I'm partial to sites w/copy and light backgrounds, dark type. I had a bit of trouble sorting out the navigation background, so I'll need to figure that out first. I'd also like to know how to push the navigation down (or have it scroll down the page w/the content?)
This article points out an interesting dilemma that has risen between professional journalists and bloggers, but overlooks a major cultural movement that has allowed this power struggle to occur that lies beyond the sudden accessibility of online technology -- mainly, society's continued questioning of the term "objective" and whether or not an objective account of any occurence can actually exist.
The rise of feminism and multi-culturalism during the 60's and 70's called into question what was previously accepted as an objective point of view as a mainly Caucasian, male and western point of view. Books like "Gender and Science" showed that no matter how objective a point of view was purported to be, it was deeply affected by the socialization and cultural assumptions of the observer. People were beginning to realize that much of the information they received was colored by the media outlet from which they received it, not necessarily as part of a media conglomeration conspiracy, but merely by the fact of their geographic location, the language they spoke and the society in which they lived.
The rise of so many media outlets has further proven this. For example, ABC offered very different news coverage of the war in Iraq than Fox news than Aljazeera. People today are more media savvy and aware that the version of events they receive depends on from where they receive them.
I think the rise of blogging as a competitive news source stems from this realization that objective journalism is an impossible ideal, that information will always be tainted by its delivery. Even a first-hand account depends on your point of view.
The appeal of bloggers lies in the very fact that they do not pretend to be objective but blatantly state their perspectives and that their accounts are affected by that. It's more informative to read a perspective that is based on a single viewpoint, than read an account that is affected by certain views but masked in supposed objectivity. Objectivity is more obtainable by reading several accounts from varying perspectives and finding the common thread.
Or maybe, there is no such thing as a single, universal account of any event, that all of history should be a composition of individual accounts and instead of searching for a universal version, we should be open to a myriad of perspectives, each as factual as the next, depending on where you're standing.
The smokiness of the room reminded Bailey of the morning fog on the bayou and fishing with his grandfather. He heard a nudging cough, took a drag off his cigarette and laid his hand down. The players were silent, wondering if Boa would actually take Bailey's life, even if he now had the right.
