Documentary!

When I started this project, I didn’t really know where I was going with my idea. All I knew was that I wanted to do my documentary on what happened to Myspace. The project turned into a sort of memoir of the old Myspace mixed with an introduction to the new Myspace. I had not planned about putting anything about the new Myspace in my documentary because I had no idea they were even relaunching, but I thought that it added to my project. It sort of gave it a direction.

There are some things that I wish I could have done with the video if I had had more time to work on it. I had initially planned on putting in some screen shots of Myspace and Facebook but I decided it would be too complicated. I could not even imagine the time it would have taken me if I had to take the audio from the video, add the background music all on Audacity, find a way to convert it to an mp3 file, and then try to get the video to sync up with audio. And to do that with multiple videos would have been too much of a hassle. I think Windows Movie Maker is very flawed in that you can only have one audio track playing at a time. If Movie Maker had the option to put multiple audio tracks then it would have been way easier to add the screen shots and I definitely would have done them.

One other thing I wish I could have done is to film in quieter areas. Filming my interviews in my dorm lobby may not have been my best idea but it honestly did not occur to me that people would be walking in and out and making a lot of noise. Usually our lobby is totally dead but it just happened that that night it was bumpin’. One thing I thought about doing was putting the louder videos into Audacity and trying to make the background noise quieter. I did fool around with it for one video but the effects in Audacity are really confusing for someone who has never used them before. It ended up that the audio I created in Audacity didn’t match up with the video well enough. Instead I tried to hide some of the background noise by putting a quiet instrumental song behind all the videos.

I thought my interviews went really well. I did very few interviews because I really liked what they had to say and most of their footage was usable. It made it really easy to transition from question to question. I also thought that the facts that I added in about Myspace in its prime helped my argument. One thing I did not like too much was the long text at the end describing the new Myspace. Unfortunately I ran out of time to think of a different ending and I didn’t know another way to show all the cool new features that the new Myspace has. In the end I was pretty happy with how my documentary turned out.

Shooting Schedule

This weekend I will be visiting my friend in Louisville. I will interview her there and also some other people there. Hopefully I can get about half of my filming done this weekend. I have an exam on Tuesday and I work on Tuesday through Thursday so my filming will have to be done on the weekends. Next week I will probably try to do some filming in the break before and after our WRD class. I may also try to interview some people that I work with. Over Thanksgiving break I will try to film more of the younger and older aged people. I know several people who I know that are avid Myspace and Facebook users so I think that they will have an opinion of my subject.  I hope to try to kind of edit as I go. I’ll probably try to do most of the editing over Thanksgiving break.

Documentary Proposal

Whatever happened to Myspace? For my documentary, I’m going to revisit the world of Myspace. I’m curious as to why it has almost completely disappeared. It used to be the main social media website several years ago and now few, if any, use it. Facebook has dominated the world of social media ever since Myspace died. It basically has replaced Myspace. But why? Myspace offered so many more ways to personalize your profile. You could have a background on your page, add pictures and playlists, and also have a “top friends” list. I believe that Myspace disappeared because all of these different aspects over complicated things. But I want to see what others think because I think we often forget that Myspace ever existed.  So I think my audience will be interested to find out what happened to Myspace.

 For my interviews, I plan to interview mostly other college students because we may be the only people who remember Myspace. When Myspace was popular we would have been the age that dominated the site. College students will also be my main audience because of these same reasons. I will try to ask several random people I don’t know, and also some friends. However, I will also interview some younger high school students from my high school and some older people. I think that Myspace was mostly used among teenagers when it was in its prime. Now though, Facebook seems to be used by all ages. So why has Facebook reached so many more ages than Myspace ever did? I plan to investigate this.

For my documentary, I won’t be using the shaky cam style mostly because it gives me a headache. I think that I will use my own camera for filming because it has several features that I think will be good for filming such as zoom. It would be easier than renting one. But I will have to do some playing around with it to make sure it can do everything I need it to do. Especially record audio. I will probably film at my high school when interviewing the high school kids and maybe teachers too. I will try to do this when I go home one weekend. When interviewing other college students I will probably interview some of the people I work with at Subway, and some other people in the library. I will also probably try to get on either mine or a friend’s Myspace and do some shots of the website to allow my audience to familiarize themselves with the website again. I may also do the same with my Facebook so we can compare the two sites. I’m not sure I will be able to do all this in time but I will sure try.

Some of the questions I plan to ask in my interviews will be: Did you have a Myspace? Do you still get on your Myspace page? Do you have a Facebook? Which site do you prefer? (which I expect the answer to be Facebook) Myspace had so many more features so why do you think no one uses Myspace anymore? What makes Facebook better? What did you use Myspace for and what do you use Facebook for now? How often were you on Myspace and how often are you on Facebook? What makes Facebook so much more addicting? Do you think that Myspace will ever make a comeback? Do you think what happened to Myspace will ever happen to Facebook?

 

 

Remix Essay Final

Are Video Games Art?

I would consider video games to be a form of art. Kellee Santiago from the TED talk defines art as “the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions," a definition found on Wikipedia. By this definition, I think video games can be considered art.

In the article “Less Talk More Rock”, they show how much more we get from images than just written or spoken word. It says that written and spoken word only appeal to your intellect while an image, sound, music, etc. appeals to your whole mind. These are all components of video games so they must appeal to our whole mind. Therefore, they should be considered art.

 

 

When most people think of art, they think of paintings like the Mona Lisa by Da Vinci or Starry Night by Van Gogh. These are considered art because our culture tells us they are. But who is to say that video games aren’t art as well? Someone had to draw the characters and the backgrounds. I’m sure several teams of people spent years developing the concepts and rules and trying to animate these drawings. In the article “Less Talk More Rock”, this is the rock phase of creating a video game, the most important part of the process according to the Superbrothers.

Both Santiago and Roger Elbert compare video games to cave drawings. They call them “chicken scratch”. In other words they are saying that they are very primitive art. They think that they evolve into better art. I’m sure there is room to grow for video games but I think that most modern video games are really impressive. They are so complex in their graphics, and concepts. These two pictures are from the two most recently made video games, Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. The details in the background and on the characters are so remarkable and I think it is almost an insult to suggest that they are primitive.

 

 

 

Elbert considers filmmakers, painters, and composers as makers of art. But aren’t video games just a combination of all of these types of art? They use cinema to tell the story of the game and to create objectives and obstacles, they use graphics in the background, characters, etc., and they use music to get the emotions of the game across. And I also think that the way that they combine these things can be considered an art form as well. In my opinion it takes just as much creativity to create a video game as it takes to write a novel or a song.

Storyboard

Facebook is kind of like speed dating.

You won't learn everything about a person simple by visiting their Facebook page.

 

People's opinions of me often come from what they find on Facebook.



If someone were to look at my Facebook, they would only learn what I want them to know about me.

Facebook makes it all too easy to judge others.

Jake and his new girlfriend Chelsea.

The only way to truely get to know me is to tald to me.

for some reason it won't let me upload all my pictures. it took probably 2 hours to just get these up here.

Song Choices

I'm going to use the song "Real with me" by Cady Groves because the lyrics sort of go with what i talk about in my essay. And my second song will be the instrumental version of the song "Home" by Phillip Phillips because it is a very pretty acoustic guitar song that's not too fast or too slow to go with my essay and I think it will flow nicely with the other song.