Winds of Change

I’m a huge fan of fantasy and I’m easily lost in the stories of the universes created by authors and movie directors. Jenkins brings up many points that coincide with the fan-created material that I’ve seen today as well. When he mentions that game engines are being used for animation, I thought of Valve’s Source filmmaker. Their games run on the Source engine and so lot’s of fans make hilarious videos of characters in the games doing funny stuff. The professor did this for the video tutorial. Another game engine that comes to mind is Grand Theft Auto’s. I saw a video recently where 5 famous movie scenes were recreated using GTA’s game engine. It was absolutely mind-blowing to see how well the scenes were done!

The Internet has seriously changed how fast fan-created media can be shared. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit is where I see most of the fan-created material. Reddit is my main source actually, and it semi recently became popular over the past few years. A girl told me she used to read romance fan-fiction of Harry Potter and fictional characters on sites back in middle school. Anime is getting more popular over here in the states and I know that many fans make their own comics about the characters in theses series as well. They hold huge conventions where they can even sell their fan-fiction. The relationship between the fans and product owners can be both positive and negative. With copyright problems stemming from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, some media cannot be tampered with and fan-recorded footage put on YouTube are taken down. However, artists can converse and connect so much more with their fans through social media sites. Instagram and Twitter basically show the lives of the creators and their thoughts are told through tweets.

Our progress thus far

The group project has been going very well so far. The completion of the script was the first milestone accomplished, but the creative process for it was on-going. We changed up a few lines, added some, and deleted some scenes during recording. It was interesting to see how many scenes we recorded back in retrospect. There were so many instances when we would just mess up because of laughter, stuttering, or the audio would be too low. It was a huge feeling of success after we finished one day of the whole group filming. In the coming weeks, we’ll have to take a screencast of our screen of the student going through the process of applying for internships on a screen. This task shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish because we won’t have to worry about shaky hands or having the pressure of being on film. The voiceover parts should be a relatively simple thing to do as well. It was amazing to see how well Dustin had edited the audio. He cut out the insistent buzzing of the lights in the room as well as other unnecessary noises. He did this by first obtaining the mp3’s of all the clips and then matching up the sounds after editing. I believe that another future hurdle for our project will be to edit out the beginning and / or ending of video clips where we purposefully began late or ran the recording too long. Thinking on it now, I hope we can cut off the same length of both the video file and the under-laying mp3 files…if not then that will take quite a bit of time. I learned that Dustin had used the techniques that were shown in class, and also he had searched on Google on tips for editing the audio. I anticipate we’ll be using the other techniques that were taught in class as well for adding songs during some scenes and the screencast.

3 things that might help us

http://www.shutterstock.com/en/pic.mhtml?utm_source=44814&utm_campaign=Pixabay&id=253848799&utm_medium=Affiliate&irgwc=1&tpl=44814-43068

I think that the image above could be used since it’s very simple and easy to look at and lists things that pertain to an internship. We could insert this picture into the beginning of the video around where the student comes up with the idea to look for an internship.

I found this song by using the search query, “searching.” I think the sound of the song is pretty mysterious and quite relaxing. We could implement this song anywhere as well when there isn’t any dialogue. It would fit a credits screen pretty well or perhaps during a scene when a character is searching for an answer. I’m pretty happy that I found this artist on Soundcloud since I’m liking all his music so far, so this homework assignment was useful to me at least.

 

This video was about how this man obtained his internship at Amazon. He talks about his experience with going through the application process and describes in detail what his recruiter asked of him. I particularly like how he quoted the interviewer, “do you have the capability to pick things up.” It’s a nice, short video and perhaps we could include the part where he lists what he needed to apply to Amazon.

A particular section of Lessig reading that stuck out to me was when he mentioned Louis Brandeis’s dissent and quoted him saying “how you protect privacy is a function of technology, and we need to translate the old protections from one era into a new context”. With the Internet and how easily things spread, copyrights, quoting, and using materials of others becomes a problem of course. A great analogy Lessig uses is with the free use of a book and how reading it isn’t infringing on any copyrights but producing a copy is. In regards to the 3 media above, the website provided to us had checkboxes that stated the material could be used for commercial purposes and be modified so I didn’t encounter any problem.

Creative direction of our story

I’m very much looking forward to what we’re going with in our group project. I’m hoping to have clean editing over recorded footage of our detailed walk-through for the topic we’ll be presenting. If we incorporate a story setting, that would be awesome as well. I’m hoping to learn different ways to do moving shots and incorporating that as well. Considering that the length should be around 3 minutes, I don’t think the video will take that long to make; the editing however will be the bulk of the time spent working on the video. I’m worried about the editing part because I am horrible at editing, but on the bright-side, I will be able to learn more techniques to improve my editing. I think incorporating one minute of a scene shot at the office will be a good addition as well. It’ll be a professional shot hopefully so I’ll be emailing the woman soon. We can start with that and then make a nice transition into our tutorial for the topic. We can then fill the rest of the extra time with humorous clips or short dialogues. Everything considered, I’m happy with our group’s creative direction and am looking forward to the project!

Top 5 Midterm Blogs

https://toofittoquitsite.wordpress.com/

The aspect that stuck out the most to me was how the video was put together with nice edited footage of the computer desktop and the song choice. You also spoke in a clear and concise manner so even though there was the song in the background, I could understand your words.

https://ruinvolvedsite.wordpress.com/

The scrolling Star Wars text made me laugh out of nowhere to my pleasant surprise. Your opening music caught the attention of my ears immediately so I was focused. It was very clean in it’s edits. The same format being used for each “section” caught my attention as the only thing repetitive, but my interest was never lost due to your funny video clips. I liked how you included many other “actors” in your film.

https://marksfoodsite.wordpress.com/

Jeez, this was amazing. This is made my list because I love food, especially pasta. I can eat pasta endlessly, but only if it meets one requirement of mine, which is: no cheese. Yeah, it’s weird but I’ll only eat cheese if it’s on pizza or else I prefer food without it. I liked the simplicity of your video coupled with the fact that the footage being fast-forwarded was amusing to watch. Your delicious product made me read the recipes on your other posts as well leading me to cooking dinner for myself. Something that rarely happens to me because I always get takeout.

https://howtosurvivecollege2016.wordpress.com/

I found it amazing how your content was all self-produced. It liked all the pictures and videos you put up, the street band was entertaining and pictures of that kid on the rodeo bull. Great tips as well, of course. I’ll be putting your tips to use during my next spring break. This is another instance where I’ve heard about AirBnB. Clean layout as well. The best part however was that edm section with random clips following the beat. Wonderfully edited and even though it didn’t pertain to the main point of your blog, it made your video standout for me. Nice job talking about other things to do in the blog post as well.

https://danielfangru.wordpress.com/

This video made my list because Counterstrike Global Offensive is the game I play now. I’ve been playing video games my whole life and even now I’ll play CSGO for at least an hour everyday. I was so ecstatic when I opened the blog and the whole screen was a picture of the game. I actually clicked around thinking he had hidden links in the picture. I was that surprised. Anyways, I liked the footage of the game on mirage, he had great AWP kills and a lot of them were nice flicks. I’m sitting here wondering about what rank he is. I’m going to guess in the novas or AKs? The video had a nice song and funny clips edited into it.

In terms of creativity, I could have done much more with my blog after looking at other people’s assignments. I should not have gone with just footage of me speaking and obtained recorded footage of other videos. I wish I looked at the final renditions of the blogs of my classmates’. Like I said in my paper component, I was going to obtain footage of myself completing exercises but sadly couldn’t at the time of recording. I was very glad to hear that we could continue the midterm blog for extra credit because I can still use the blog for its main objective and that is for my personal motivation. I’ll probably add more blog posts along the same vein of ideas and I’ll finally record footage of different exercises as well. I look forward to making these blog posts because it’ll force me to research about different nutrition and delve deeper into knowing about what supplements to consume.

It’ll be nice working in groups. I tend to work much harder in groups just because I don’t want to seem like I’m slacking and so I proactively look for ways to contribute. In terms of Questions of Intention for this project I hope my group members actively participate because a mere “execution of a command” will definitely not be enough. When I work alone, I end up procrastinating until the last minute because I can’t find motivation to start a paper or project. I have surprisingly never edited a document on Google Docs before. I have heard of classes and stories from friends where the whole class will work on a study guide together and post about it in the chat room on Sakai. This idea reminded me of the Wikipedia ideas about contribution in the Social Media Reader. There would be conflict when people keep editing the same section if they have disagreeing views. I think the toughest is always the Questions of Equality because everyone wants to feel like the work is separated fairly. I liked how the rubric had the page requirements for each section of the paper so we know how much to write.

Video Editing

I had a much tougher time making this video than the previous assignments. I just am not good with the program used for editing. I also need to work on my presentation skills and my confidence in speaking in front of a camera. I knew I had trouble speaking in front of people, but I was surprised that I was anxious about making a video as well. Honestly, I disliked it so much that I probably won’t make another video again.

A couple years ago, I would level up characters and play for hours just to discover more of the game’s story. Nowadays, my attention for games has significantly decreased from the past. When I think of how politics may be presented in videogames, I first think of satire. When people play games, I’m assuming they’re like me and they want to do cool things or laugh about stuff that happens in the game. Satire is a perfect way to state an opinion on something political while making a joke out of it.

The article on firstmonday.org used Civilization as an example, and I think the Real-Time-Strategy game type is a great genre to simulate some forms of politics such as waging war on other civilizations. I’ve played the 3^rd installment of the series and had a great time setting up my base of operations and progressing through the troop and building upgrades.

I truly don’t believe that a game made for the purpose for spreading a political agenda would sell (and if it did, surely it would not sell well). A possible way to accomplish this however, would be to make a game where your character is a young person who is trying to get into politics and works his way up from a local representative to a senator and then finally into the Presidential seat. The player would make all the decisions for their character and in those dialogue choices, political agendas could be mentioned and therefore learned about. It would have to have some drama such as backstabbing tropes or perhaps huge scandals around the character in the game to be interesting though.

Editing Audio

 

I was surprised that I enjoyed making this audio project. I had purchased a Mac knowing that many music-lovers I know praise its applications. I finally learned how to use Garage Band, something that I’ve been putting off doing so for too long. When choosing my songs, I listened to what the professor said about using two completely different genres of music so it was easier to hear the difference between the two songs when the first cut off. Editing the audio was pretty easy, but I know my amateur job pales in comparison to professional edits. It was fun seeing how the edits affected the overall project and I now have a vague idea of why my friends who DJ spend all day in this program. I chose the first two songs that had download links in my “Likes” section on Soundcloud.

I chose to watch a vlog about the movie, Deadpool from channelawesome.com because I had recently seen this movie so I wanted to hear more opinions on the subject. The video features 2 guys who basically share their thoughts on the movie. The first part is a general overview that does not contain spoilers. Around 5 minutes in, they edit the video to splice in a rotating “Spoilers!” message and continue on with their movie review citing specific scenes from the movie. I’m positive that they created the whole vlog themselves and they probably used a microphone that is positioned in front of them. I was surprised that the only edit was the Spoilers! message because movie reviews usually have scenes from the movie shown in the video review. I figured I might as well watch another one since this one had only one edit.

For the second video, I searched up “anime” and saw a favorite title of mine called “Berserk”. The video was really well made and the maker had numerous edits throughout. For every reference to different anime or video game characters or subjects, he made an edit with a picture of said subject. Like the last review video, he made everything himself and recorded with a microphone. He had many more edits of course, and overall, I enjoyed this review video much more because of these edits and the humor. He had an alter ego character that he asked for commentary as well, which was just himself dressed with an eye-patch and a hat. He might have taken this idea from Anthony Fantano, a famous music reviewer on YouTube. Both videos had the same camera angle, just a straight shot the whole time at the reviewer’s face.

Editing Images

I found this off a quick google search using the query, “Maplestory”

I’ve only edited images a handful of times in my life and they were basic edits using the program, Paint. All the pictures I edited were screenshots taken using the printscreen function on this massively-multiplyer-online game called Maplestory. I played the game consistently throughout middle school to early high school so it was a big part of my childhood. I was in a guild in the game with many friends from school along with my cousins from different states and random online friends I had met through the game. We would edit funny pictures of our character avatars and share them through the AIM messaging system from AOL. I never attempted to learn how to use photoshop, but a few people I knew had knowledge of the program and made the funniest pictures. Mine, however, were basically just filled with objects being circled and phrases like “LOL” and “OWNED” strewn across the picture in disjointed letters written with the paintbrush in Paint. In recent years, I’ve used the tool, Gyazo, which essentially crops whatever is on your computer screen at the time and instantly hosts the cropped image online for you to easily share the url. While playing this game and other MMO’s, I discovered gaming forums and message boards where people could discuss tips and tricks on how to build a character or level up efficiently. During my visit to these online hubs of interaction, I encountered many trolls, who engaged in “flaming or flame wars” (Coleman, p. 110). These people would insult anyone they desired and would start arguments just for the sake of making someone angry. A common phrase on the GameFAQs message boards I frequented was “ignore the troll” which was usually posted by a helpful user trying to calm down someone who took the “troll bait” (a troll purposely trying to elicit an angry response from someone).

I found this image by googling “4chan troll”

4chan is an imageboard website where people post anonymously which easily allows trolls to…troll. Many hackers are also browse 4chan and have even been reported on the news.