November 08, 2005

Temporal Continuity in Editing

I enjoyed reading about directing a lot. It made the project we were working on this week feel a lot more like a professional project. Not that we really based very much of what we filmed on what we had read, but I at least felt more informed about what I was doing.

The reading made me want to do more experimentation with film, too. As we've been shooting this film, and as I've been reading about film directing the past few weeks, I've started to pay much more attention to how the editing of movies and TV shows is done. I'm kind of amazed to see how much of a rich visual language there is in television and movies that I was more or less unaware of until now. Of course, the flow should be seemless if done right (according to our readings).

Reading about (and thinking about) the issues involved with maintaining continuity and getting coverage has caused me to have a lot more respect than I did for directors. I realize now in a much more tangible way that there is a lot of planning that goes into getting a good shot. When we were filming we typically only used a single angle/range for every shot, although I would have liked to experiment with using multiple cameras or at least different takes with different angles to see how that can contribute to our film. It's becoming clear, though, that we are mounting a very ambitious project and multiple takes are a luxury for people not trying to get done work for 3 other classes.

The experience so far has made me really want to a) make my own feature-length film and b) star in one.

Here is a link to our pictures from the second day of shooting.
Day 2 of the Mime Shoot: I am not a mime.

Posted November 8, 2005 12:25 AM. Categories: Assignments , Reading Responses , Week 9 | Permalink

October 11, 2005

Podcasting

I'm kind of unimpressed by podcasts. They have been touted for many reasons, most of which aren't very revolutionary. The idea of putting spoken-word audio (i.e., a radio show) on an iPod to listen to later is not particularly novel. The real revolution, if there is one, lies in the feeding of the podcasts. Streamlining the process of getting that audio onto your iPod or other digital music player, letting it be something that can happen passively, is a real improvement over the alternative, but even so this phenomenon strikes me as just the modernization of a practice that has been going on for a long time, with nothing seriously new added.

Taping video or audio for later viewing/listening has been going on for several decades, in some form or another. The digitization of the process makes it easier (automatic, even) to do the recording, but I don't see how the new distribution channel substantially changes anything.

Posted October 11, 2005 02:08 PM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 5 | Permalink

October 09, 2005

Understanding Comics

This week we read from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Will Eisner's Sequential Art, both pieces of writing dealing with timing and rhythm in comics.

As an infrequent comics reader, I have only thought superficially about the structure rather than content of comics. Perhaps that is why I was so struck in reading these twin articles at the incredible depth of the form. I have read comic books, but probably not for about a decade, and the only other comics I read have been Calvin and Hobbes, the newspaper funnies, and a few graphic novels (Maus I and II and a brilliant book I discovered this spring called Blankets, which I will return to later). I realize now, after having watched McCloud pick apart the elements that go into comics timing, that I had been aware of a lot of these devices already, if only subconsciously.

As I said, I read Blankets, by Craig Thompson, in the early spring of 2005. The book is a plaintive tale of first love found and lost, and as I read McCloud's descriptions of gutter spacing and panel placement, I remembered more and more how it was more than simply the content of the novel that affected me, it was also the layout. Thompson does an excellent job with the pacing. I remember in particular a full page image of the young lovers together in the snow at the edge of the woods (similar to but not the same as the title page), and the size of that panel created the lingering effect that it had, and without it one might miss the longing and sadness in that moment.

Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson, was my favorite comic during my early teens, and then I rediscovered the strip in early college, this time equipped with the vocabulary to get the half of the jokes I had missed the first time around. The pacing of those strips was also very well done. There are borderless panels, wide panels, Calvin and Hobbes leaping out of the bounds of their panel, and so on. I was unaware at the time of the way these different structures affected the story, but I now realize they were crucial elements.

In honor of what I read, I created my own little comic. Click to enlarge.

Posted October 9, 2005 02:46 PM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 5 | Permalink

September 27, 2005

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This is a reading response to an article by Walter Benjamin.

This week's reading continues last week's trend of going over my head. Unfortunately, I can only respond to what I understand, and so I'll give a pretty conservative reading here, sticking only to what I thought I understood.

Basically, art, the kind that's usually put in quotes, or called high art, or something similar, was originally developed in a very different kind of world than ours. This art (think paintings) had to be painstakingly crafted, usually by a single individual, usually taking a great deal of time. The work could only be displayed where it resided, meaning people had to come to see it. Meaning rich people saw it, and not very many of them, and that was it.

So a lot of kinds of art—paintings, sculptures, etc.—were originally developed in this context, where they were meant as single entities, to be shown to and appreciated by a select few only.

But the modern world has turned all that on its ear. We no longer have to share physical space with the original work of art to view it. An original is hardly unique anymore, for it can be reproduced (in some fashion or other) a limitless number of times. Benjamin also points out that film allows us, through the speeding up or slowing down of the reel, to see things—"art"—in a way that we as a species were heretofore completely unable to see.

I believe the author lays this point out to show how the context for traditional art no longer applies, but I'm not sure what the point of that would be.

It seems to me that there have been efforts made by modern-day artists, operating in the old-school mode (i.e., painting), to subvert the context-changing power of mechanical reproduction. One obvious way is in the way that prints are often numbered. This artificially limits the number of extant originals of a work of art. Also, theater seems to be an art form that has been largely immune to the sort of diluting effect of mechanical reproduction, for a play is something that is difficult to move from place to place (though not impossible), and it is impossible to recreate the ambience of the theater in any form.

The author also trots out the Dadaists, a group who, cognizant of the changes in the art world that reproduction was having, consciously created works of art that had no artistic, contemplative, or material value. They were anti-art.

Benjamin takes (to me) a severe left turn in the epilogue to his essay, in which he ruminates on the aesthetics of war. He positions war as a kind of logical extrapolation of art in the age of technology, and draws a parallel between struggles for changing property relations with the struggle of artists to carve out new plateaus in their art.

Posted September 27, 2005 12:34 AM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 3 | Permalink

September 25, 2005

Chapters 1,8 and 9 of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media

This reading took the discussion and consideration of media's effects several levels deeper than I've ever thought possible. There is a lot of use of what seems to be a specialized media studies vernacular that I was unprepared for, and navigating the ideas on the author's terms was difficult. I spent a lot of time resisting my initial feeling that the emperor has no clothes (words?). Nevertheless, I'll do my best to summarize, react (when possible), and explain.

In the first chapter, The Medium is the Message, the author expounds on the time-worn cliche that I had never really considered in depth. One statement that I liked was the example of the light bulb: a light bulb is not considered to have any content until it is being used to spell out an advertiser's name on a sign. I had a hard time with the author's statement that GE is in the business of moving information. When lights are used to display a message, yes, I can see how that would be true. But can't a light just be a light? The lights in my apartment certainly don't spell out any messages.

The author also states that a light can be used to enable a surgeon to perform surgery and to enable baseball players to play in the night. I fail to see how this is relevant. Aren't there a multitude of other media that enable the actions to occur? Gravity, air, the blood in the veins of the surgeon (the patient), the baseball players, are all enabling media.

The author did do a good job of dispelling the myth that technology is only either good or bad depending on how it is used. That is certainly a well-accepted fallacy.

Chapter 8 is titled, "The Spoken Word: Flower of Evil?" In this chapter we explore a little bit how different the spoken and printed words are. What came to my mind is email and IM conversations gone awry; when the non-verbal, non-printable gestures aren't effectively communicated, a lot of conversational cues go missing, which can lead to misunderstandings.

An interesting point made in that chapter, the significance of which is still not quite clear to me, is that electric technology does not need words, and may indeed lead us to a collective consciousness much like that of preverbal humans.

In chapter 9, "The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear," the author explains the fixing power of written language. He makes clear the limits of written language in the way that signifiers with adequate external referents (like the words, "American Flag"), while they do completely describe their external objects, are poor substitutions for them.

Posted September 25, 2005 11:01 PM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 2 | Permalink

No Strong Link between violent video games and aggression

This is a response to an article entitled, "No strong link seen between violent video games and aggression"

The debate over the effect of simulated violence in video games on their human players is part of the larger debate over whether violent imagery in any media (books, movies, music) tends to incite aggressive behaviors. This larger debate is really a long-standing feud between free-speech proponents and pro-censorship pundits that has been going on probably nearly as long as mass media entertainment has existed. The general formula has been something like: concerned high-profile congressperson wrings hands, cites study linking media violence to real-world aggression, urges enactment of law restricting violent imagery; rest of world does not notice, continues to buy violent video games in record quantities. At least, that's been my understanding.

The researchers in this article, much to their own amazement, have fired an unexpected salvo on behalf of the free-speechers by reporting the results of a long-term study that shows no link between violent video-game play and violent behavior. This would be a watershed indeed in the history of the video-game violence (VGV) debate if the authors appeared to have any confidence in their results. Instead, they almost apologetically report their findings before completely undermining them by saying, "I'm not saying some games don't lead to aggression. ... I don't think we should make strong predictions ... given this finding." Luckily the point is moot because their research is pretty clearly flawed.

In order for VGV to really have a chance of arousing violent tendencies in its players, it would seem that there are three aspects it would have to have:

1. The game-play should be really, really graphically violent (e.g., 3-d blood droplets and grisly limbs flying).


2. The game-play should be lifelike (i.e., it should be easily imitable and easy to identify with).


3. The game should glorify that violence (i.e., the character, and by extension the player, should seem all the cooler for having slaughtered an enemy).

A couple of games (Carmageddon or Grand Theft Auto in any of its incarnations) come readily to mind as meeting all three requirements above. Asheron's Call 2, the game that the researchers chose to study, could only be said to fulfill the first requirement above, and that seems like a stretch. Granted, I've never played it, but any game in which the following two screenshots are deemed representative (via Asheron's Call 2 Vault) clearly doesn't qualify, does it?

I can't tell what the second picture is, either. A cat-lizard cross riding a cucumber-worm-two-toed-sloth? Even if it could kick serious ass, I'd can't imagine anyone being terribly inclined (or able) to imitate it.

This may be missing the point. The conductors of this study most likely decided to choose an RPG to study because of the immersive quality of the game-play. It's undoubtedly true that RPG, especially MMRPGS, are very conducive to one's losing one's real-world identity in favor of the game's avatar, but what's lacking here is an appreciation for what it is about a game that would incite violence (see the list above). It could even be argued that, in a perhaps counterintuitive way, MMRPGs, due to their social component, might actually encourage moral responsibility. Normal individuals tend to be more influenced by social mores the more a part of their society they feel, and because of the unique social atmosphere in an MMRPG, individuals who are solitary in the flesh world but nonetheless heavily involved in their game may feel themselves to be an integral part of that society. When one is more attuned to how his actions influence the rest of the community, one is less likely to cause harm to that community. These lessons, learned in the online world, might cross over to the player's "real" world.

Even though this research wasn't conducted particularly well, the mere fact that VGV is now considered a valid arena for study may well represent a positive turning point in this debate. Future research should focus on games that are most likely to cause aggressive actions in their players due to their (the games) being most similar to real-life situations of violence. Choosing Asheron's Call 2 to study is like researching the question of whether violent movies cause violent behavior by disregarding Pulp Fiction and instead focusing on Star Wars: Episode I. The day that a light saber-wielding Jar Jar Binks incites violent behavior in viewers is the day that this debate can be considered over.

Posted September 25, 2005 10:49 PM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 1 | Permalink