The lecture started out with quite a shocking scene from a film called "Hapiness". Shocking in the sense that it has a conflicting soundtrack with the footage but also shocking as these events have happened in the past. However during this footage, i heard a couple of students around the lecture theater laugh or giggle. It may have been because of the fact that they knew that this isn't real and is only acted out for a film, therefore it's easily to laugh at it's surreality. OR it could have been because that we've seen and played games and videos more extreme that we are de-sensitised by any form of violence.
Bill went on to talk about video games and the "glory" of headshots. the idea of rewarding the gamer for a more gruesome kill could be a factor which helps to desensitise an audience.
the whole idea of making violence seem the norm has produced many games and it reminds me of the game "Fat Princess". This seemingly inncoent looking game has bold colours and cute looking characters which seem to been taken straight from a childs story book. However when you start attacking the other team, it becomes quite graphic and can sometimes turn into a bloodbath
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCO9eBuDkD8 FAT PRINCESS GAMEPLAY
On the next level up, the online cartoon "Happy Tree Friends" bases its comedy and ability to entertain solely on this play of first impressions. The introduction of the videos and layout of the website is incredibly "cutesy" and innocent but when you watch the cartoons, they get into situations where they get decapitated and brutally slaughtered by unfortunate events
http://www.happytreefriends.com/ HAPPY TREE FRIENDS
our society has become so used to violent images that we've come to laugh at it and it has become an element of comedy in some parts like we see in happy tree friends. however, we could say that cartoons like tom and jerry and the looney toons cartoons have helped desensitise children to violence. Although they arent violent in the sense that you see blood or heads come off, they feed the notion that violence can be funny.
Hollywood have also got a lot to answer as all films have made violence "sexy" and more appealing in film. We discussed in our lecture about this and looked at kill bill, where the violence is taken to the extreme. we also compared how a real gunshot would sound to the ones we hear in films and how much the gunshots in films are made to be much more dramatic and stylish. Films like the matrix in particular, where there are countless bullets and guns being shot when we all know that this could never happen in real life. When neo holds the two uzis on each hand, he wouldnt have been able to keep the shot on the target in reality, his aim would have been all over the place, same with when they hold the guns at a 90' angle, and he would have been deaf after the gun fight with the SWAT team. However we dont look at films as a reality anymore and just watch in awe at how cool/sexy violence can get.
Monday, 29 November 2010
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
New Media
This lecture was the start of our new lecture. I found this was a very interesting lecture which touched on video games and film and the way it has been improved. Although i felt it wasnt structured in a way which was easy to follow, many interesting points were touched on.
From what i remember we first touched on film and wathed an old black and white silent film calledThe life of an american fireman by Edwin Porter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM-DhskWrDA
the 2nd half showed some firemen saving a woman from a burning house. however the event was repeated but had two different viewpoints. looking at it now it seems unnecersary, broken and boring to watch but what edwin porter touched on was the idea of looking at an event in more than one viewpoints to further engage the viewers. We then watched another film where at the end, the actor was directly interacting with the audience by pointing a gun and shooting toward the screen which lead to our discussion about video games.
This end scene with the gun inspired games like Wild Gun where by it was a live action video game where you react according to what the actors do on screen and depending on your reactions, different events will take place. the modern day equivalent would be something like Heavy Rain where quick time events is the main aspect of the game.
What i found interesting about this was how this game is more film than game. However not all videogames have managed to make this combination successful. Story is almost a small aspect in some games. whenever you want you can skip cutscenes and jump straight into gameplay and when you can't, you only wished you could.
From what i remember we first touched on film and wathed an old black and white silent film calledThe life of an american fireman by Edwin Porter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM-DhskWrDA
the 2nd half showed some firemen saving a woman from a burning house. however the event was repeated but had two different viewpoints. looking at it now it seems unnecersary, broken and boring to watch but what edwin porter touched on was the idea of looking at an event in more than one viewpoints to further engage the viewers. We then watched another film where at the end, the actor was directly interacting with the audience by pointing a gun and shooting toward the screen which lead to our discussion about video games.
This end scene with the gun inspired games like Wild Gun where by it was a live action video game where you react according to what the actors do on screen and depending on your reactions, different events will take place. the modern day equivalent would be something like Heavy Rain where quick time events is the main aspect of the game.
What i found interesting about this was how this game is more film than game. However not all videogames have managed to make this combination successful. Story is almost a small aspect in some games. whenever you want you can skip cutscenes and jump straight into gameplay and when you can't, you only wished you could.
Monday, 8 November 2010
Binary Opposites
Binary opposites wassomething that i grasped hold of very easily. Itt was basically something that we all see in every form of entertainment/media we come in contact with. books, films, and comics all follow this sort of opposition to give their story balance and interest to their viewer.
Go(o)d (d)evil
Life Death
Light Dark
Male Female
White Black
Land Sea
these comparisons are obvious binary opposites. the collumn on the left is often favored over the other in some way be it for good reason or bad. we prefer good,life and light over their opposites. Males were often (and still are in some countries) the dominant gender and there have always been a racial divide between whites and blacks.
land and sea is a bit more complex as its obvious that we're land creatures, but structures like piers allow us to enter a part of our binary opposite. when we do enter our binary opposites, things start to get interesting and we start to lose ourself in some way.
Piers allow us to "step onto the sea" and we're in a anomoly zone where unusual activities happen. i.e. meeting of lovers/romance, drug dealing. Better examples is when we enter dark places like clubs or cinemas. we usually wouldnt sit in a dark room full of strangers or enter a crowded place where we know suspicious things happen. it goes against our natural instincts but we go back to these because we like this.
Knowing the importance and our inerests in binary opposites is important as applying this to film causes the viewer to become inticed by the film.
Batman was an example brought in both the seminar and lecture. Batman is obviously the hero of the main story and he has many villians. However we know that he has a troubled past and in the end, he's a brute who uses violence to solve most of the problems he encounters. essence of good and evil. same can be said about his villians. all of whom have a history and a reason for their actions and none are completly "insane".
Another example is Frankenstein. The story of this has many binary opposites involved Frankenstein creating the monster immediatley touches on...
God (Frankenstien) and Man(the monster
Human(Frankenstein) and Non-Human (monster)
Life and Death
Parent and Child
These may be the reason why it is one of the most iconic horror stories of all time and why it is able to capture the audiences interest in whatever time period.
UPDATE 03/12/2010
My friend told me about the new film Megamind and told me the story line. apparently the main character is a super villian who kills his arch nemesis near the beginning. however this means that there is no binary opposite of the villian, rendering his existence useless. It reminds me of the scene in Dark Knight when batman interegates the joker and the joker says "i dont wanna kill you. What would i do without you. you complete me"
Back to megamind, the villian then creates a new superhero but he ends up doing bad things and the main villian ends up being the superhero.
I think thats the main plot of the story but i found it was a really nice twist on the whole binary oppposite theme most fillms have. it shows that even though the theme has been used for years, certain twists to them still keep it fresh and interesting.
Go(o)d (d)evil
Life Death
Light Dark
Male Female
White Black
Land Sea
these comparisons are obvious binary opposites. the collumn on the left is often favored over the other in some way be it for good reason or bad. we prefer good,life and light over their opposites. Males were often (and still are in some countries) the dominant gender and there have always been a racial divide between whites and blacks.
land and sea is a bit more complex as its obvious that we're land creatures, but structures like piers allow us to enter a part of our binary opposite. when we do enter our binary opposites, things start to get interesting and we start to lose ourself in some way.
Piers allow us to "step onto the sea" and we're in a anomoly zone where unusual activities happen. i.e. meeting of lovers/romance, drug dealing. Better examples is when we enter dark places like clubs or cinemas. we usually wouldnt sit in a dark room full of strangers or enter a crowded place where we know suspicious things happen. it goes against our natural instincts but we go back to these because we like this.
Knowing the importance and our inerests in binary opposites is important as applying this to film causes the viewer to become inticed by the film.
Batman was an example brought in both the seminar and lecture. Batman is obviously the hero of the main story and he has many villians. However we know that he has a troubled past and in the end, he's a brute who uses violence to solve most of the problems he encounters. essence of good and evil. same can be said about his villians. all of whom have a history and a reason for their actions and none are completly "insane".
Another example is Frankenstein. The story of this has many binary opposites involved Frankenstein creating the monster immediatley touches on...
God (Frankenstien) and Man(the monster
Human(Frankenstein) and Non-Human (monster)
Life and Death
Parent and Child
These may be the reason why it is one of the most iconic horror stories of all time and why it is able to capture the audiences interest in whatever time period.
UPDATE 03/12/2010
My friend told me about the new film Megamind and told me the story line. apparently the main character is a super villian who kills his arch nemesis near the beginning. however this means that there is no binary opposite of the villian, rendering his existence useless. It reminds me of the scene in Dark Knight when batman interegates the joker and the joker says "i dont wanna kill you. What would i do without you. you complete me"
Back to megamind, the villian then creates a new superhero but he ends up doing bad things and the main villian ends up being the superhero.
I think thats the main plot of the story but i found it was a really nice twist on the whole binary oppposite theme most fillms have. it shows that even though the theme has been used for years, certain twists to them still keep it fresh and interesting.
Sunday, 7 November 2010
Intertextuality
This was the one lecture which i missed and was thoroughly disaapointed after asking people what the lecture was about, looking through their notes and looking at the slides and document files on studynet.
From what i gathered the lecture was purely based around films and tv shows which really caught my attention. It;s impossible for me to say what i though of the lecture (obviously) but from what i read, it seems like intertextuality is the equivalent to post-modernism in fine art.
post-modernism points out the fact that no piece of art or idea for an art piece is original in any way shape or form. therefor the idea must have been generated from another piece or more likely several pieces. this makes the final outcome a work of several arts. also it can be argued that the artists didn't know that the idea hadn't been done before which brings in the idea of the unconcious and self-concious mentioned in the slide.
In the context of films and tv shows it is exactly the same. i immeditaley think of family guy, much like many other people would i think. the show basically only consists of references to 70s-80s tv shows and films based around a fairly loose storyline. if i was able to, i could probably list every single film i've ever seen in my life and make an epic spider diagram showing what element of the film is intertextual to what and not one film will be original, since the subject is so wide open. story lines are also intertextual. sure you can add all sorts of variables, characters, obstacles and settings but in the end it all boils down to a genre such as horror, quest, action, romance. I remember beng told that there are only a certain number of different genres/types of stories and shakespeare touched on every single one.
going through the slides, i always thought that bram stokers novel was sort of "the core" of the dracula franchise and everything else was intertetual from that. but never really questioned that he took influence from other novels.
From what i gathered the lecture was purely based around films and tv shows which really caught my attention. It;s impossible for me to say what i though of the lecture (obviously) but from what i read, it seems like intertextuality is the equivalent to post-modernism in fine art.
post-modernism points out the fact that no piece of art or idea for an art piece is original in any way shape or form. therefor the idea must have been generated from another piece or more likely several pieces. this makes the final outcome a work of several arts. also it can be argued that the artists didn't know that the idea hadn't been done before which brings in the idea of the unconcious and self-concious mentioned in the slide.
In the context of films and tv shows it is exactly the same. i immeditaley think of family guy, much like many other people would i think. the show basically only consists of references to 70s-80s tv shows and films based around a fairly loose storyline. if i was able to, i could probably list every single film i've ever seen in my life and make an epic spider diagram showing what element of the film is intertextual to what and not one film will be original, since the subject is so wide open. story lines are also intertextual. sure you can add all sorts of variables, characters, obstacles and settings but in the end it all boils down to a genre such as horror, quest, action, romance. I remember beng told that there are only a certain number of different genres/types of stories and shakespeare touched on every single one.
going through the slides, i always thought that bram stokers novel was sort of "the core" of the dracula franchise and everything else was intertetual from that. but never really questioned that he took influence from other novels.
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
Another movie and Semiotics lecture
Finally found some time to watch a film and watched predators with my bro. deffinatly the second best predator film, bout time to be honest after all the awful films they made after the first.
The design of them were pretty good but you can see the "bulkiness" that they had in the AVP films, which looked pretty bad in my opinion. only one of them looked like the original. Notably though there was a scene with an explosion and the visual effects were actually quite bad! itreminded me of a lecture where we had a small discussion about re-creating fire in cg and how its one of the most difficult to do since its so free flowing.
SEMIOTICS
i remember this lecture starting out to be quite confusing at first where we were told about a cybernatic feedback loop. something that was quite difficult for me to understand on a thursday afternoon. but it was a little more clear with the activity.
the iconic and arbitory theory was also quite confusing though the theory was probably worded in a more complicated manner than needed. an interesting point was raised during the seminar which conflicted with said theory. We were told that an image of a cat would be more iconic(realistic) than just the word CAT. however a more arbitory form could be more realistic than an image. If say someone didnt know how ZEUS the god looked like but read about him in books and stories, wouldnt the word ZEUS be more iconic than an image of a bearded man?
The design of them were pretty good but you can see the "bulkiness" that they had in the AVP films, which looked pretty bad in my opinion. only one of them looked like the original. Notably though there was a scene with an explosion and the visual effects were actually quite bad! itreminded me of a lecture where we had a small discussion about re-creating fire in cg and how its one of the most difficult to do since its so free flowing.
SEMIOTICS
i remember this lecture starting out to be quite confusing at first where we were told about a cybernatic feedback loop. something that was quite difficult for me to understand on a thursday afternoon. but it was a little more clear with the activity.
the iconic and arbitory theory was also quite confusing though the theory was probably worded in a more complicated manner than needed. an interesting point was raised during the seminar which conflicted with said theory. We were told that an image of a cat would be more iconic(realistic) than just the word CAT. however a more arbitory form could be more realistic than an image. If say someone didnt know how ZEUS the god looked like but read about him in books and stories, wouldnt the word ZEUS be more iconic than an image of a bearded man?
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