Peanut Butter + Jelly

Shilya and I teamed up to make an animation in flash. Shilya already had a specific story in mind so we just went with it. Like the video project, we started out by drawing the story boards, which was very helpful in helping us understand how the characters moved and the general flow of the story. Translating story board into flash was easy, though I must say the flash program was kind of hard to use. One mistake I kept making was editing symbols that were already used in other symbols. This would ruin our entire animation! Anyways, Flash took some getting used to, but once I got the hang of it was just following the storyboards to draw out frame and creating movement.

Here's our piece.

I didn't draw the <3's

Posted by ben chao at 11:36 AM | Permalink

For comlab we had to create a 2 minute video piece. I teamed up with Rucyl and Shilya for the project. Drawing the story board was actually took longer than I expected. We wanted to use some material from the 55 sentence stories we wrote before, but found some of the scenes too hard to shoot. In the end we decided to do something in the kitchen since we all loved to eat and figured we'd have a lot of fun playing with veggies. We ended up with a story about vegetables being massacred (cooked).

The hardest part of the shooting was getting the lights right. Since we were in a small confined space, there was a lot of reflection off the walls. It must have taken us at least an hour to figure how to bounce the light off the white walls properly. Once we got that part we decided not to change the lighting too much, so we shot a ton of footage before we moved onto the next scene. We actually just ended up with two scenes, on with the veggies laid out on the table and me cutting/slicing it, and anothe with the lights off of a boiling pot.

Usng Final Cut Pro was actually easier than I had imagined. A lot of the functionalities were similiar to audio editing programs, so having struggled through Audacity for our sound piece was actually a blessing in disguise. My favorite feature in Final Cut was how we could name clips so we could find it easily for editing. I wish they had that for Audacity!! We stuck with the scenes we had drawn in the storyboard, so editing did not take long. When we added audio, we had to do some slight adjustments in times to match beats of the music, but it wasn't too hard to do.

Overall editing video was a much more pleasureable than editing audio. When editing audio, it was easy to identify if something did not sound right, but I had no idea how to fix it. I didn't really have this problem with video. I think that is true for most people, since unless you're a musician/audiophile you really don't know how to make audio better.

Posted by ben chao at 10:10 AM | Permalink

I think the main reason we have such a huge debate intellectual concerning property/copy right laws right now is the law/decision maker's definition of ownership differs greatly with how the general public percieves it. When we buy a magazine, cd, or any physical object, we the consumer assumes full ownership of it. We can do anything we want with it – break it up, reassemble it, burn it, whatever. But with creative content it becomes a huge debate on whether you are hurting the originator's sales or not – something which I believe is extremely hard to prove.

Anyways, laws concerning copy right and intellectual property need to be updated to serve the public better. Obviously somethings such as brand names need to be protected, but accecss to digital content should be more lenient. I feel that using segements from other songs/movies/videos should be no different than writing a research paper. As long as you give the originator credit, you're good. I don't foresee such changes to over go through our legislations any time soon though.

There is another problem that is unique to the digital age - how can authors/creators get paid? I think micropayments is the way to go, though I think a viable system is still at least 3-4 years away. People will pay for digital content - iTunes is a prime example of something that works. Obviously there are somethings nobody will pay money for, but for most creative content people will be willing to pay. While I think applying micropayments to news articles and comic stripes is much harder, I don't think it is entirely impossible. Quality of content and ease of use is the key to getting people to open up their wallets.

I sometimes feel the whole intellectural property debates is magnified by cultural differences. American's concept of ownership/fame/fortune are in some ways very odd to me, and it would be interesting to see how other cultures deal with these issues. One of the problems though, is that most countries base their intellectual property laws on America's. It would be interesting to see what each country would come up if they each wrote their own rules.

Posted by ben chao at 05:18 PM | Permalink

Just finished the Eisner and McCloud reading. I've been reading comic books all my life and this is the first time I've actually given thought about how time is represented in 2D form. I think comic books are a lot like story boards - they convey time and mood through dialog and lighting. When I read comic books I create a continuous story in my head, filling in the gaps that are not drawn between frames. Subconciously I was filling in different durations based on what was potrayed. This reading really made me want to go back and examine the "frame" of an image effects my perception of time.

This really is just an excuse to read more comics.....

Off topic, but one thing I noticed about western comic books is the lack of the "color". Where as eastern comic uses many different shades of gray to represent the contrasts in color, western comics are usually just in black and white. But then again I don't read too many western comics, so I could be completely wrong about this.

Posted by ben chao at 11:57 PM | Permalink

This is what shilya and i came up with.

Dark stuff...really dark stuff...

The original images are here, here, here, and here.

Posted by ben chao at 08:56 PM | Permalink

Image of Dick Cheney as Dr. Evil.

Earth in a box.

Composition work found on Flickr form CTaylor.

Posted by ben chao at 05:51 AM | Permalink

Walter Andrew's essay on the effects of mass reproduction - in 1964 - strangely foreshadows what is happening in the digital world today. He argues that that through mass production, art has lost its "aura" - its uniqueness and authenticity. But during his times, merely replicas were produced. Today, images and videos are completely altered to deceive the viewer. A person with just basic skills in photoshop can easily change a picture and completely destroy is authenticity. Even the media is a huge paste work of what sells and cutting out of what doesn't. It seems that as technology becomes more accessible, reality is more and more distorted. It doesn't really bother me that such practices are taking place, but it has become very important for the viewers to become active thinkers, as opposed to the mindless viewers Walter Andrew mentions in regard to film.

I find it amusing that during his times, those viewing a piece of art work would need constant focus and concentration. It seems to be the exact opposite now. When I'm watching a film, photography, or other forms of media I'm constantly thinking about its political and social implications, taking everything with a grain of salt. One the other hand, I'm viewing a painting these days, I don't need to think at all.

Posted by ben chao at 11:45 AM | Permalink

This was a rather painful experience at first. I started out by examining the index and css file. When I couldn't find some of the classes that were used, I suspected that Movable Type has a lot of hidden classes that we can't see (which I later confirmed by googling). A friend taught me some more advanced syntax for css which helped me understand a lot of the original css file. After examining the sources for a few sites and looking up some references, I was able to understand the jist of things. The hardest thing left was determining what to do.....

The main change to the website was moving the categories link right below the banner. This gives the reader more freedom to navigate around the website, since this can be added for all the different archives (date, categories, entry). It also provided a common place where the user can link to different topics, which could only be done by returning to the main site in the previous design. For the colors I choose earthlier tones since it's easiest on my eyes after a hard day of work....

Warning - MT's web-based editor seems to load everything from a database, so ssh'ing into your itp account and then updating the html and css files with emacs/vi won't actually change a thing. If you want to use an outside editor you have to follow the instructions here. I realized this after a rather painful one hour struggle where I had to rebuild the site numerous times.

Lesson of the week - read the manual!!

Posted by ben chao at 12:31 AM | Permalink

The Angler

First came the nibble, then the bite. He pulled, tugged, and reeled in his prize after a prolonged struggle. At first hopeful, but then left with disappointment, he let it back to the ocean. It wasn't the One. The One that once tugged away his rod and twice busted his reel. He casted again, waiting.

Posted by ben chao at 01:04 AM | Permalink

1) Humans are creatures of habit. When they are used to one form of communication, they usually stick to it. It shouldn't come as a surprise that teenagers now-a-days are at the forefront of using the web to gather information. But you also have to keep in mind that there are kids out there that are complete newbies to these forms of communication, and may not be comfortable posting/finding info on the internet. If schools never teach these kids about what is available to them, they would be more and more segregated from the masses that do. Teaching them how to use such forms of communication is just as important as teaching them how to utilize it safely and responsibly.

2) The fact that institutions that receive federal funding are prohibited from using existing web infrastructures is extremely dumbfounding. These are sites people are accustomed to, and I think to encourage students to join, you need to stick to what they have used before. Creating a brand new portal for students is extremely costly, both for the government and the institutions, and does not guarantee success. Instead of recreating a model that already works they should work with what is available. If students are inclined to join existing public spaces, then the government should work with these companies to make them more secure, not excluding them from the process.

3) I think making technology available to everybody will be the next challenge for schools. Again, we don't want people to lose out on the opportunity to benefit from these mediums. Providing affordable access to such technologies will not only level the playing field for those less fortunate, but also provide students with more confidence in dealing with the web, which is an integral part of doing business these days. That is why projects such as creating the $100 laptop is so important.

4) Technology should be used to supplant existing teaching methods instead of replacing them. How successful a person is in the world really comes down to how well they deal with people. Being able to communicate over the web will take you far, but having person-to-person interaction is still what drives most relationships. I took an all on-line course during college - the subject was easy - but I did terrible, because there was nothing in it for me except filling my credit requirement. I knew nothing about my teacher, nothing about my classmates. Some people can work that way, but for me the inter-personal relationship is what ultimately makes things work.

Posted by ben chao at 07:54 PM | Permalink

This is actually the hardest assignment I've had through the first week of class. Being an engineer for the past 10 years, I've been trained to think about how to go from point A to point B, think about efficiency, think if things are plausible and how to get them done. So when I'm asked to read about something and then just comment about it, I was actually stuck. Engineers usually don't get the freedom to choose their own topic. It was both liberating and daunting. After being stuck on the assignment for a day, I just thought, what the heck, just write about whatever popped into my binary mind. After all, that is my reaction.

Why doesn't Movable Type have spell checking? I had to type everything up in word first then copy and paste it back.

I wrote individual points instead of one long piece because this is how information is organized in my head. The last time I've thought about transitioning from point to point was freshmen year in colllege for my writing class. I'm not good at it so I won't try - at least not today. No need for more stress.

Posted by ben chao at 12:08 AM | Permalink