Final Blog Entry

This one I’m putting on here because, despite the somewhat random, sporadic nature of the subject, it was a place where I kept my thoughts together for the project. I also speak about our (lack of) production techniques and the changes that have occurred from the original script. https://harrolawrence.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/reasons-why-we-shouldnt-be-allowed-around-cameras/

 

If you’re looking for more material of me ranting on end about how much I hate viral media, then hey you’re in luck. Unfortunately I feel this post had to be cut short, otherwise I could have gone on at length about several other topics such as the My Little Pony epidemic, the YOLO plague and many more (as you can probably tell, they wouldn’t have been positive). But I digress, memes are a staple of the internet and everyday living, they may be annoying, but then again they give us something to complain about, which is another staple of the internet and everyday living. https://harrolawrence.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/viral-media/

 

My limited knowledge of Ayn Rand came into practice here. It’s astonishing how large an effect her literature had on companies and artworks year and decades down the line. Admittedly I quickly turned the subject into a discussion about Bioshock, but that was because Bioshock took so many inspirations from the subjectivist movement. https://harrolawrence.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/ayn-rands-effect-on-everything/

 

Of all the posts I did this year I think my favourite to do research for was the Alternate Reality Games subject. This is a subject I am greatly interested in, even having a little first hand experience in the subject from participating in one a few years ago. The idea that something can be a game without having to call itself a game is interesting in itself, but the really well designed one that have interesting puzzles or plots are the real standouts among the crowd. Human curiosity is what drives people forward in these games and human curiosity is what made me interested in these games.  https://harrolawrence.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/the-intrigue-behind-args/

 

Ah Advertising. It’s a lucrative and interesting industry, it’s a business that is in every one of our lives, every where we look there is an advertisement. In here I discuss the ethical quandaries raised by tools such as adblockers and the redesign of blip to combat the blocker. It’s an interesting debate that I have talked about with some other people but nobody can form a definitive answer of what can and should be done on the issue. https://harrolawrence.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=142&action=edit&message=6&postpost=v2

Network culture assignment: Harrison Lawrence

And… It’s done. The storyboard digitised and touched up, the final part has been completed, the transmedia aspects embedded.

Planning

Originally when we were given the opportunity to make a film I was considering doing a horror film in the found footage format. Horror films, particularly slashers, are a medium I personally love and I wanted to try my hand at making one. However there were some problems with this concept. For starters, since this was a transmedia project and it had to be embedded into the real world that drew up some legal issues (see Method of delivery), and secondly it would be rather difficult to make with limited resources. So instead I opted to instead do a parody of slasher films, which then also became a parody of slasher and romance films, where in the killer was infatuated with the victim and was more looking for a ‘date’ than anything. It wasn’t until filming had ended that I realized how ridiculous this was, however it was that magnificent type of ridiculousness that it actually worked rather well to get the point across that this is a parody of sorts. However when I was scripting I only really gave brief outlines of what the characters should say, I did this for two reasons, one; some of my actors had difficulty remembering lines and two; it allowed for some great improvised lines such as the entire Lieutenant Wiskers rant and John Generic-man appearing in randoms shots.

Storyboarding

Now admittedly, since I was only giving brief outlines I didn’t fully plan out the entire storyboard, instead I only planned a few of the major shots such as the killer approaching the girl for the first time, their facebook conversation, the starting of the argument, etc. A lot of the improvised moments I improvised the camera work too. The shots I did plan out however are featured below.

Method of delivery

Originally, back when I planned on doing the legitimate slasher film in the found footage genre, my plan was to use Dead Drop USB’s or Camera SD cards to spread the video footage. However this posed some problems such as the legality of publicly distributing violent material and the risk of having police involved if someone interpreted the footage as a real incident happening. This posed me with two options, either change the content to something less questionable or change the delivery method, so I opted for a change in the content to what it has become now.  I kept the idea of having the dead-drops at the locations of where the film happened (See the picture below) but since the film is that self aware and self referential that it would be near impossible to mistake for real.

Inside the USB would be two files, one being the video and the other a text document with instructions on what to do next.

So hopefully they (the people that find the USB’s) post it onto the blog listed.

Filming

Unfortunately I don’t have much documentation here, since we were on a tight schedule with limited actors and resources I couldn’t get much behind the scenes stuff to show.

Networking aspect

In terms of networking I planned to use facebook, everyone uses facebook so why shouldn’t the killer and other characters? The accounts aren’t actually live, but here are a few images of what it may look like, as well as a link to the website that the videos would be posted on.

Website to post the videos: http://derpdeederp605.wordpress.com/

The final product

So as stated in the ‘Method of Delivery’, the video is broken up into several sections and delivered via USB. I decided to go with 4 video’s

Conclusion

And so, that is what I have accomplished in this project. It may look like a random assortment of nonsense, and if it does, my job here is done.

What does the future hold?

The Black Mirror movie presents a grim future. Where everything we do is monitored and our lives are never free from advertisements or small fee’s for living. This is evidently present from the very beginning, where the protagonist wakes up and has to pay a small fee for toothpaste every morning, followed by advertisements in his bathroom that he can either watch or pay a small fee to skip over.

Sadly this is rather accurate of the current world. In the past few weeks Blip.tv updated their player to force users to watch advertisements. Whenever you wish to watch a video that is hosted by Blip (which encompasses nearly every video on Thatguywiththeglasses.com) you now have to sit through a 30 second advertisement. If you have an ad blocker program the following image will appear for 90 seconds, three times the length of the advertisement.

This raises some interesting thoughts. What are the ethics of blocking advertisements? Should people be forced to watch them? How invasive is too invasive?

Blocking advertisements is a difficult subject, an incredibly large number of people do it but at the same time it is costing others money. For those that don’t know, whenever you enter a website and the advertisements load up, behind the scenes is a metric that keeps track of how many times an advertisement is seen, and at the end of the weekly or monthly period this data is sent to the company that advertised where they proceed to pay an agreed upon amount based on viewership. This is different to television where instead of selling advertising space based on the time slot and viewership of that show, this is a lot more sporadic as viewership of websites will rise and decline rapidly. When an advertisement is blocked however, this number does not increase and inevitably costs the website money in the long run. Inversely, what about the customer?

One anecdote I can personally bring up which made me get ad-block plus in the first place was back in 2010 I was on the gaming website screwattack.com and was watching a few videos, before every video however, there was a 30 second advertisement for Verizon, the American phone company. This was rather frustrating because it was at the beginning of every video, cannot be skipped and had no effect on me as a viewer because I do not live in the united states. Yet I was forced to sit through the video for every video. I have since joined the Screwattack advantage program, where I don’t have to view ads if I pay $4 a month, plus I get access to extra content which is a nice incentive to pay a website that I enjoy directly, instead of them having to rely on advertisement

Since then there have been major improvements to advertising, such as the ability to trace locations so that anything advertised is more accurate to geographical location or in some cases it checks browsing history to target specific interests. However this also brings up the ethical dilemma of keeping tabs on a persons browsing habits and exploiting it, selling this information to companies to use how they please.

At this point in time, there is no right or wrong answer in regards to advertising, because we haven’t found one yet. The customers are to blame for loss of revenue for websites, destroying peoples livelihoods and occupations, but at the same time the advertisers are becoming far too invasive and are blurring what is ethically justifiable by tracking individuals history and exploiting it. There may be a compromise out there somewhere, I personally like the idea of paying a small sum of money to a website I frequent to disable adverts, especially if there is added incentive such as extra content on a regular basis, but at the same time I see a lot of people taking issue with this too.

Reasons why we shouldn’t be allowed around cameras

So a few nights ago myself and a few other people set about recording the content for my Networked culture assignment.

What was supposed to happen: I spent a while doing storyboards and script so that we had a definite outline of what we were going to film and when.

What actually happened: I spent a while doing storyboard and script that we barely used because we all collaborated and came up with better content on the spot.

I’m not saying we didn’t use any of it, we more so used it as an idea of what we should do. For Example:

In one scene the protagonist is fleeing from the girl and eventually gets frustrated with him slowly walking after her instead of running so they get into an argument. What this evolved (or devolved into) was Sam talking about how his cat’s don’t respect him.

Now both of these are hilarious in their own regard, but the sheer abnormality of a deranged, masked, knife wielding serial killer ranting on about how his cats are evil little bastards and they are the source of all his problems was too incredible to leave on the cutting room floor (by which I mean the SD card of my phone).

 

Speaking of which, recording on a phone. I will say that it got the job done but I much prefer the use of proper video camera, my main reason is the phones video capture functionality is very limited. I was filming on the Samsung Galaxy SII which I found out part way into filming didn’t have any zoom functionality while recording 1080P video, this problem was easily fixed (by which I mean I physically walked towards or away from the subjects where possible, mind you I was filming with my back up against a wall several times) but it was still rather annoying. The second issue I encountered was there was no option for a tripod with my phone, unless I paid for a third party tripod or mount or built one myself, neither of which were too appealing, so excuse the shakey camera work.

 

But now all that needs to be done is one or two reshoots and some editing and hopefully it should be submitted soon.