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.
Viral Media
I should have posted this a while ago but I completely forgot about it until now.
Anyway, Viral media, I’m sure you’ve all encountered it, I’m sure it has made you laugh, cringe, cry or question humanity. I try and avoid most of this stuff since it’s a lot of trivial crap that became popular because a bunch of people wanted a new flavour of the month. Here are the three biggest (in my mind anyway) impacts of the past year.
Kony 2012- Slacktivism at it’s finest
Ah Kony, the most evil person in the world apparently, the man that Satan himself is afraid of. Or at least that’s what the video tried to make you believe. Luckily there were a fair few that saw right through the ploy and realised the director was talking the issue up to be much bigger than it actually was in reality. but I’m getting ahead of myself here. In case you were living under a mole hill or Stephen Conroys house (although they’re much of the same thing) then here is the video:
The Story: The evil Joseph Kony is raising an army of child soldiers by forcing them to kill their family in an act of rebellion against the Ugandan Government. The United states has considered sending in Special Forces to train up the local populace to find and capture Kony who is hiding in the congo. The video aims to bring attention to Kony so that he is considered a “Priority threat”.
Whats Really going on: Kony has been inactive for several years, he has been hiding in the Kongo with little to no activity in a long time, considering the rebellion happened over a decade prior to the video’s creation.
I have some personal bias on this one, I could see the campaign was pretty dodgy from the point they asked people to buy the $10 Kony 2012 pack, plus their entire campaign was built on “slacktivism”, you know, those people that are like “Man, I put up a poster advertising a major problem with the world, I am so self righteous. Yay Me!”. Although that is a pretty massive satire of what they actually do, the principal is the do minimum effort and expect maximum gains.
Although on the one side, it did educate people on a few things, such as the fact that there are corrupt warlords in Africa and Child soldiers are rather common, although you could have just watched Nicolas Cage in Lord of War, which is much better (mainly because it has Nicolas Cage)
Gangnam Style- Oh god my eyes… ears… everything!
Yep, this bloody thing.
The biggest song to come out of Korea in forever. The story behind this one from what I can gather is Reddit users found it, then they showed two friends, then they showed two friends, and so on, and so on. Now it has about 1.6 BILLION views as of writing this. For the longest time every man and his dog were doing the dance (which I don’t think is an exaggeration). The first time I was exposed to it was in my Year 12 media class when someone looked it up over the data projector, the entire time I was wondering “What the fuck was going on here?”. I dunno, maybe I’m just not up with the current trends, speaking of which…
Arrow in the Knee- Why?
If you remember correct I made a rather huge song and dance about this in the tutorial. Alright, let me get my frustration for this one out of the way right now. WHY IN THE 9 CIRCLES OF HELL DID THIS BECOME SO POPULAR!?! Seriously, it’s a comment made by the city watch at random when you walk by, I wouldn’t have even known about this if annoying twats didn’t feel the need to post this on EVERY comment section on EVERY website for the next 6 to 7 months.You could not go anywhere on the internet without this meme popping up. Although I guess if you play the game for long enough you’ll hear it a ‘few’ times.
Anyway, I hate this epidemic, which is partially the reason I felt so satisfied by this (EXPLICIT):
Anyway, that about does it for Viral Media. The question now is, what will be the next big meme?
Ayn Rand’s effect on everything
Ayn Rand is one of those people that whenever you mention the name to anyone with the briefest understanding of literature they will immediately say either “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. It is impossible to say that she didn’t have a huge impact on the world, with the United States Library listing her works to be the second most influential works besides the Bible, which considering America is around 75% Christian, is quite an accomplishment. Her work has influenced far too many to count, but a short list of people can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_influenced_by_Ayn_Rand
So what was Rands philosophy? That people should seek their own happiness. A move that defied government and church. Rand described her views as “A Philosophy for living on earth”, that we need to think for ourselves and not for everyone else.
I personally haven’t read Rand but I know of it’s influences. Take the 2007 game Bioshock, the entire setting is based on the Objectivism movement, wherein Andrew Ryan (which strikes a VERY close resembelance to the name Ayn Rand) has built a city free of the government demanding from it’s citizens, Religion demanding it’s followers give all they have in life to god, and Communism which demands citizens give all they own to the people, as shown here:
Rand may or may not have known how large of an influence she would have, but even thirty years after her death she is still inspiring people to live the way they wish to live and to embrace their inner selfishness.
What the hell were we smoking?
Three friends set out today to record a ‘Making network culture’ assignment. The end product turned out really well in our opinion. We did have to change some stuff but meh, what are you gonna do?
The Concept
The idea started off as “Remember those old ‘choose your own adventure’ books?”, “Yeah, and they had really bullshit moments where you’d flick to page 78 and die instantly”. We decided to emulate this in video format using annotations and linking. The first thing we decided was a plot, and instead of going something incredibly epic, amazing and high budget, we went for a mundane situation but raised the stakes. I won’t spoil anything, but make sure you check all the options just to see how you die.
The Wireframe
Here’s something I quickly whipped up that shows the flow of events depending on your decision: (click to enlarge)
The end product (Best viewed in fullscreen)
The intrigue behind ARG’s
I’ll admit, I was pretty excited for this weeks lecture as Alternate reality games are an interesting topic. The concept is brilliant, a game where the world we live and the mythos and lore of various franchises and stories are combined. Giving people a single clue and letting them open the mysterious puzzle-box that the puppet masters have established. It’s a unique form of advertising to say the least.
I actually participated in one at one point (admittedly not to a major extent).
Leading up to the release of Portal 2, a number of Steam games were patched. Checking the patch logs nothing was added or changed. So the internet did a little digging, finding various interesting texture packs and new files, such as this from Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
http://valvearg.com/wiki/File:002.jpg
When enhanced using Photoshop, the following letters appear
http://valvearg.com/wiki/File:Hidden_code2.jpg
At first it seems gibberish, but if you arrange the letters it spells “THE FOREIGNER”. This, however was a false positive, a way to throw us off the trail momentarily. If, however, you complete the game’s hidden “Rogue like” (Can’t save, if you die in game you have to restart, way harder) then you are given a series of letters. If Casbah is put in at the login screen you earn a “Golden Potato”. There were 36 golden Potato’s scattered across 13 games. If enough of these are collected world wide a server will come online that contains a website, if you input a password that can be found scattered amongst the 17 games in the ARG then you are greeted by the villain of Portal 1, GLaDOS, who is trying to power back on through the playing of games. The reward for ‘Winning’ this ARG was that Portal 2 gets released a week early (and it was glorious).
More information can be found here: http://valvearg.com/wiki/Valve_PotatoFoolsDay_ARG_Wiki
Some other ARG’s I have heard about that also seemed interesting:
Nine inch Nails: Year Zero/I am Trying to Believe (Based on the album Year Zero)
Ah, Trent Reznor you magnificent bastard. This is perhaps one of the more famous ARG’s, particularly among people that know about Nine Inch Nails. THe plot is, in the concept album “Year Zero”, the tracks make reference to an opressive and tyranical regime established by the government to keep citizens in order after a major terrorist attack. The game was discovered when players looked at the tour t-shirts and found that certain letters were highlighted (i am trying to believe) that lead them to the website iamtryingtobelieve.com, which was a cryptic page full of ‘the presence’. It was later discovered that there were USB sticks at the Nine inch nails concerts with the track ‘Me I’m not’ and a track of static, if the static was analyzed it would show a phone number. This was a rather well designed concept as it got people both excited and involved in the album and the concerts, the perfect ARG.
Jadusable (AKA Majora Mask Creepy Pasta)
This is an odd one as the players are less involved in puzzle solving and are more involved in observing. In September of 2010, Youtube user Jadusable posted a blog about having played Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask. The game he had (which had saved data on it) was defective and had a few errors such as the text displaying the wrong names, referring to him as “BEN”. From there, the ARG goes into an unsettling and somewhat disturbing path. Originally there was little interaction from the players, but later on in the plot ark, BEN and the “MoonChildren” escape into the world, and the players have to try and find the pieces and discover the rest of the story. This one can be unnerving due to the video’s having this discomforting feeling and the various media related to it, so I recommend not looking it up late at night.
I leave you with this video on Penny Arcade from the folks at Extra Credits:
Sound and other miracles
I’m not going to lie, the soundscape assignment I left until the last hour. Although to be honest my sounds weren’t that complicated (generic crowd conversation and a newspaper) which resulted in me walking through the Agora with my phone set to record before shuffling some paper around in front of a microphone. This was less a result of me not giving a crap and more a result of having more important issues crop up, so don’t hold this against me.
Anyway, here’s the fruits of our time and dedication.
Julian Assange
On October 4th 2006, a new website would come along to permanently change the face of the internet. A place where classified information can be viewed and shared for free the world over. The content of the website quickly drew a lot of controversy, as the information ‘leaked’ was secretive government and military data. This website is known as Wikileaks.
Wikileaks can be credited as one of the greatest networking achievements of the past decade, an open website where anyone can anonymously post information about current world issues, information that the powers that be may not want seen.
Of course, the history to Wikileaks is rather interesting and intricate. Assange, began his hacker life in Melbourne under the alias Mendax. He believed that the people had the right to information and what better way of communicating this information than using the rising popularity and coverage of the Internet. Assange started out as a hacker, remotely breaking into server banks with the goal of collecting important information. He did have a code of ethics however, such as “Don’t damage their systems (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (Unless you’re covering your tracks); and share information.”
Despite the ethical nature of his hacking and the nobility of the cause of sharing information, Assange has drawn criticism because he is sharing “State secrets” publicly. This included footage of civilian and reporter casualties at the hands of United States Soldiers during the Iraq war. At the time the media wasn’t showing this side of the war, they were focused on the heroic struggles of the United States Soldier. 23 year old Bradley Manning was in the military at the time and was rather disturbed by the lack of truth in the battle reports. Manning entered the closed off Military network and collected all the data related to the incident before releasing it to Assange who posted it on Wikileaks. When the news of several civilian casualties broke there was a mass uproar, both over the military not being upfront about the actual events in Iraq and Manning illegally obtaining information that the US held for “Safety reasons” . Manning is still awaiting trial for all his charges.
If Wikileaks hadn’t been established this information may not have reached as large and audiences as it did. This information was free and accessible by anyone with an internet connection. Anyone can access this network and see what the military didn’t want them to see. A world linked by their desire to know the truth, a desire to understand what is really happening. To quote former CIA operative Victor Marchette, who wrote the book ‘The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence’; the first book the Federal Government went to court to censor, “The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing- for you, too, are considered the opposition, the enemy… In fact, they could even lie to you and what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it.”
harrolawrence 
