Storyboarding
I wanted to combine Com Lab with Core Design since we needed to create a storyboard for both. So I had the story fresh in my mind, and decided to create a detailed drawing of the story. I thought that the storyboard was a bit too ambitious to be done in flash and so did my classmates. I also didn't want to do it in flash because I didn't want to make it a cute cartoon; I think it's hard to avoid the cuteness factor in flash. I wanted to make a visually stimulating, and vivid animation, just the way I remembered this moment: the way a child would imagine or see something.

Making of
I was going to work in After Effects, but b/c of time constraints didn't find the time to sit and learn it. I decided to try to overcome the cuteness problem I was facing in flash. I redrew all the images and characters of my story in flash using a Wacom Tablet. I was going to leave them in black and white to avoid having the cartoon-touch of flash by using the paint brush, but I toyed around with different ideas, and came up with the illusion of water colors. I would loosely paint only the legs or beaks or the water - the colors that I wanted to bring to life, and kept everything else white and blank. I painted outside of the lines and with a level of transparency to create the illusion of a water color painting. I'm not sure if the effect worked well, but I really liked how it looked.

I had requested from Matt Fargo to simply play the acoustic guitar and sing Puff the Magic Dragon , just the way my dad used to when I was a kid. I used to sit on the bed while he would play me his Peter, Paul and Mary favorites; my favorite and most memorable song was Puff. So Matt went beyond the call of duty and recorded an amazing version of the song using 2 guitars, a bass, percussion, and harmonies - all played/sung by him. I had intended to have a poor-quality-dad-version of the song playing in the animation, but I really loved his version and that it would add a new dimension to my animation. I think it made a huge difference and set the tone of the entire animation - made it magical.

I also decided to keep the animations really simple, since the entire focus of the animation were the duck feet and their underbellies. I only had ripples, bubbles, and animated wading ducks.

While working on the animation, I realized the different scenes might not make any sense to a person who doesn't know the story. That's when I decided to add audio. I wrote a 4-5 paragraph audio piece and tried to find a QUIET PLACE on the floor to record, but found nothing. It was really late at night (since this was a last minute decision), so I had to make do. I sat in the stairway, which wasn't quiet, but it was good enough. I used an M-Audio recorder, and I think I recorded myself too low. I should have kept the audio levels higher. I recorded each paragraph several times, b/c I never liked how I sounded or how I pronounced things, my speed, my tone, etc.

I used Audacity to cut the audio piece. I ended up only using 30% of what I had originally recorded, because I realized I didn't need to narrate everything, but that I could get a better effect by simply reflecting about my childhood memories. I decided to have the audio running slightly independant of the animated sequence. I had also tried using Audacity to mix the song with the narration, and it sounded fine in the headphones. When I presented it to class it was horribly mixed. I'm planning on remixing the two and rexporting the movie once finals are done.

I will post the animation once I have remixed the song and the narration.

Storyboading

The process for our movie started off with a very abstract concept: playing chess with death. Most of us agreed that we wanted it to be a philosophical mood piece, and we were debating making it a silent movie or not. The most important thing for me while making this movie was aesthetics. I wanted it to look beautiful and dark, because I felt those were the factors that would set the tone of the movie.

Our storyboard was done textually. We had agreed on a simple plot and chronological event order, however abstract. We didn't want to limit ourselves, and I think we all were open to see where the movie would take itself. We all agreed on the basic plot, and the things we couldn't agree on (e.g. the ending), we wrote down mulitple endings and at the time decided we would shoot more than one during production.

Production

We met on a Sunday afternoon at Baek's apartment. We needed a set with a bedroom, and a sparsely furnished room with just a table and a chair. During production, things we had originally planned in our storyboard changed on the spot because we liked something more, or a happy accident occured, etc. It was great that everyone was flexible and we all had the same common visual ideas, so that worked out great.

I played death, so I had to paint my entire forearm and hand in white. Dean played our protaganist I. Baek was the cameraman for the entire movie. Corrine played death's shadow in the shadow scenes. All of us contributed to scene setup, sequences, ideas, and visuals.

It took us all day to shoot, some scenes took A LOT of takes, while others took only one. Many of the scenes were impromptu scenes that we had not orignally planned, but we all wanted to add into our movie.

Post-production
It was difficult to have all of us meet for editing, so we decided that whoever had time would go in and work on our project. We had all initially agreed on the basic idea and sequence, and we all had the same vision for the final product.

I worked on capturing our footage. Most of our footage looked extremely dark on the computer monitor, but it was fine on the TV. Lesson learned: always have good lighting, and make it darker post-production, because going from dark to lighter degrades the quality. During production we had agreed to use natural light, and didn't realize that it would look different or extremely dark on a computer screen. Dean did the bulk of the editing, and was extremely creative in making the loss of quality and he darkness of our footage work to our advantage. I was extremely pleased by the outcome.

We had all agreed we wanted no dialog in the movie. Dean had woke up on morning and wrote a song that worked perfectly with our piece, so we used it. It all came together nicely.

It is extremely important to trust the talent that you have with you, when working in groups. I think the simple, abstract plot line, the shared vision, and the group trust that we had established resulted in a really good short. I am proud of it, since this is the first movie I've ever worked on or contributed to. I would love to go through this process again and work on some ideas I have.

I will post the movie once I figure out a way to compress it!

Features two songs by Fairuz - the legendary Lebanese singer.

It's quite interesting how much time and effort people would invest to pirate software, create peer-to-peer tools, and so forth, to avoid paying money and/or to support free content. Somehow society has created a value-system of what is worth it and what isn't. For example, people are not willing to invest in a CD, but are willing to pay half that amount to watch a movie in a theater; while some others will download it directly using file-sharing tools. I cannot imagine where the future of IP laws debate will take us, but a system of micro-payments will not survive. The only win-win situation I can imagine is advertising. It seems to work for many existing models, and it's not a hassle for the users/readers. I am not sure why McCloud wouldn’t rely on advertising, unless it is inconsistent with his beliefs. Perhaps there will be a better implementation of BitPass in the future, or a more successful micropayment model, that would reimburse artists for their work.

What really impressed me was the YouTube and Warner Music deal. It's groundbreaking when a small startup company like that can have so much leverage over a huge corporation like Warner. This essentially consolidates the power of the online community and signifies the power shift that has been happening gradually.

Some screen shots:

My Process
My original idea was to make a musical from the start. I had intended to make a musical with fish, but it was too complicated and I didn't have the proper camera equipment to do it well. So instead, I made a musical using silverware! I used colored clay, silverware (forks, knives, & spoons), and straws. I also used a white board as a background, and I shot the images using a bird's eye view. The main idea behind it is that each character has a few mouth/facial expressions that I use in loops, according to the music. I used a Canon PowerShot A520 without a remote and without a tripod, at first. I finally obtained the tripod, but I didn't use it for many of the shots. It was difficult to get the angles I wanted, since I wanted a bird's eye view, and that was impossible with the tripod I was using.

Problems I faced were the problems everyone faces when doing stop motion. I think I'm too clumsy for claymation. I kept walking all over my set by accident!

We used the following images to create the one above:

Image 1 - of us

Image 2 - water overflow

Image 3 - picture frame

Image 4 - M. Petit

Image 5 - the bathroom

This is a digitally tampered image of actress Kate Winslet, to make her appear thinner. Here is the related BBC news article about the airbrushing.

A doctored photo of Jennifer Aniston, which is a composite of 3 different images of her. This USA Today article lists other cover photo "airbrush" scandels including Julia Roberts and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Most celebrity/model photos are manipulated or airbrushed in some way.

But, while researching manipulated images, I found this extremely shocking:

Now, if you really want something to Grrr! about when it comes to altered photos, Reuters journalists and photographers have reported that international photographers regularly have corpses dug up from their graves and stage rescue operations for their photo essays in places like Beirut and more than likely — although not included in the Reuters report — Bosnia and Kosovo. - Mike Straka

This type of photo doctoring is dangerous, and unacceptable; however, it's been found in most major news agency - most recently Reuters.

A third example of a doctored image is of a hovering U.S. Air Force helicopter, where a SHARK has been added in for a sensational effect. The second picture is the original image of the helicopter (HH-60G Pave Hawk Helicopter - Photo by Lance Cheung
U.S. Air Force Photo ), and the third image is a photograph of a Great White Shark taken by Charles Maxwell (Cape Town, South Africa).

The concept: I wanted to make a navigation menu for my blog, using CSS. I wanted the navigation bar to be horizontal and I wanted it to appear 'highlighted' when the mouse hovers overs a selection.

The problems: Apparently there's a known BUG with Netscape browsers and CSS floats (which I needed for my horizontal menu). It took me a while to get it performing correctly, but I had to do a workaround solution. In the end, it's stll not perfect. I'm probably going to keep returning to this navigation bar to debug. In general, I kept running into many IE vs. Netscape differences - which were quite annoying. I will need to revisit these issues.

I followed a few design rules that I had decided for myself:
1. This is a blog - Make the content and navigation simple and understandable. Sometimes I get lost in blogs, so that's why I wanted a main navigation page (which is still under construction)
2. Many blogs have a very minimalist interface - Go Wild. I love paisley patterns, victorian patterns, and early 19th century patterns, so I decided I was going to dedicate my interface to William Morris!

Issues/Concerns:
a - I have 0 web design experience and so I'm worried about color choices, background images, how it looks to the user, how it feels on the eyes.
b - Browser incompatibilities :( I'm a netscape fan, so I was very disappointed when my little menu wasn't performing.

TODO:
1. Fix the naming: I have 2 "Main" links w/ different meanings: one is "Back" and one is "home"
2. Fix the traceback/comment url and headers
3. Apply the CSS validation
4. Actually make all the links work.... :/

Oh, and one more thing: you get so absorbed by the aesthetics of it, that it ends up eating up so much time working on your code.

Of all the readings, the "Blogs of War" struck me the most. I mentioned the reason behind the fascination in my blog entry, but it basically revolves around the idea of experiencing a previously unknown, private world. It's a powerful idea - you can live through others essentially. I was especially interested in the dynamic between public and private domains of information and how the DOD will react to this shift.

The Fifty-Five short was by far the most diffcult assignment I had to do this week. You would think that with a limit of 55 words, it's impossible to get writer's block? Think again. I tried to brainstorm ideas on pen and paper. I bounced ideas off of people. I let story lines marinate in my brain over a few a days. Still nothing.

I soon discovered the power of dialogue. While a third-person narrative is a great way of setting the stage, a first-person dialogue allows the reader the opportunity to make his/her own conclusions about the characters and the setting. I found it was the best way to be absent and objective, giving the reader full access to the story.

"Damn! Do you hear that?!"
"Yea."
"Can’t you feel that smooth, sexy vibe? That Jazz?!"
"He’s a hell of a saxophone player."
"See why I wanted to stop here?"
"C’mon Vince...we gotta get to class."
"Hold up, J. Let me pay my respects."
"Then, give him the dollar! We’re going to miss the L train."

Toy Soldier

"What've we got?"
"Double homicide: Mother, daughter. Multiple gunshot wounds in the girl’s chest and Mom's back."
"She was shielding her?"
"Yea."
"What happened?"
"He won't talk - we found GSR on his hands."
"Where’d he get the gun?"
"From a box of their Dad's belongings. He died last year on the boy’s 8th birthday."

War is online, and it's public. It is no longer the sole burden of soldiers and commanders. We, as a community, are involved in this war, whether we like it or not. And we are not a small community either. The blogging community has well surpassed 20 million and keeps growing exponentially. Search engines like MSN, Yahoo! and Google show results of user generated content and blogs alongside more traditional media sources. In response to this growth, Google took it a step further and launched a blog-centric search engine. In other words, milblogs cannot be any more public.

The appeal of milblogs is the insight it gives the reader into formerly forbidden, unknown worlds. They bring to life real accounts of another fascinating experience foreign to our own spheres. These milbloggers give us a superficial peek at how it feels to be on the front line, in the trenches of war: we can experience life through them in a very real-time way. But doesn’t this then make us liable?

Perhaps that is what milblogger Chris Missick meant when he stated that “the implications of thought expressed by soldiers daily could be explosive.” Involving the community in such an intimate and real-time way implies that the government will have to be prepared for the consequences, since it will be held accountable for blog content. The leakage of digital images of Abu Ghraib caused an international uproar and a domestic scandal. The damages and consequential investigations caused by such information, clearly demonstrate how powerful and explosive information can be.

But the real question is: how should the government respond to this medium? Should the government be defensive and regulate this communication forum? Large companies embrace blogs in such a way that they continuously monitor and research this online community like it was a living organism; companies interpret blogs as the voice of the people and rely on them in order to avoid PR disasters. Big businesses are forced to review the consumer complaints, because they simply cannot afford to ignore these “rants”.

The Pentagon is investigating the implications of milblogging in the war zones, and the type of regulations it will impose on Internet communication. However, it should take the large corporations and their blog-friendly relations as models. In a large company, there is some information that is confidential similar to the type of information that would violate Army regulations such as military operations. However, other thoughts and topics of these milblogs do not violate regulations and can be of a benefit to the military and the DOD in the same way that blogs offer valuable feedback to businesses.

The essential issue is that the DOD will need to accept the milbloggers as a powerful and beneficial community, a representation of the voice of the people. It will need to be open to the idea of redefining the private sphere of the combat zone into the public space. It will need to recognize the fact that in the 21st century, mainstream media (MSM) is rejected in favor of citizen-journalism. It is all related to the concept of the Trust Barometer: we tend to trust the average person who is just like the rest of us. Essentially this idea is what drives the popularity of the milblogs: he’s one of us, I can identify with him, and hence I can trust him. Why rely on MSM corporations that are so far removed from my world? People just trust journalists less. The implications of this type of power is best described by milblogger Blackfive, he states that “ he can mobilize thousands of people and their wallets, all from a wireless hot spot at his local Starbucks.”

But with this amount of power comes responsibility, and since citizen-journalists and milbloggers have usurped media sovereignty, the line between authenticity and fallacy can easily become blurred. It’s a double-edged sword: will the average blogger be accountable for what he reports? Will the facts be honored? Is citizen-journalism a system without any verification?

One can argue that the beauty of it blogging is if someone disagrees with you, they have the full right to do so, and they have equal power and voice. There is no hierarchy between a blogger and the audience, since the idea of an audience has been obliterated from this medium, and has in effect become transient.

The Pentagon will need to answer these questions and many more, because of the potential volatile nature of milblog content. But it will have to eventually come face to face with the blogging community and create some type of relationship with it. It is inevitable in the digital age that the combat zone will remain in the public sphere. The war is public after all, and the Internet is No Man's Land.