Gollum’s MTV Awards Appearance

 The clip from Tama’s ‘Communication of Special Effects’ lecture featuring Gollum at the 2003 MTV Awards:

The Social Effects of Media Violence Tutorial Task

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech Shootings in which 32 people were killed by a lone gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, 21-year old Sydney man, Ryan Lambourn, sparked outrage by creating a game based on the massacre. This week, you’re asked to take a look at the game for yourself, here: http://googumproduce.com/flash/vtech_riaa.swf. How do you respond? Is this game unethical? Also, take a look at the various media responses to Lambourn’s game here: http://googumproduce.com/vtechresponse.php (keep in mind these clips have been collected by Lambourn on one of his web pages). What do these responses say about how the relationship between games and violence is currently portrayed in the mainstream media?

For a little more background on Lambourn’s game and its impact, click here. For tutorials, make sure you’ve at least looked at Lambourn’s game and have thought about your response to it.

Media Clips for the ‘Media Violence, Moral Panics & Videogames’ Lecture

Here are the full versions of the clip’s used in this week’s lecture. The full Daily Show clip focusing in video-game violence and Congressional hearings in the US:

(The Videogames bit of The Daily Show starts at 1:30 into the clip.) The Coca-Cola advertisement based on Grand Theft Auto:

Creativity … (well, sort of)

For this week’s tutorials on Creativity you’re asked to use the Dvolver MovieMaker to get your creative juices flowing and produce a little short film using Dvolver’s tools (albeit, rather limited tools at that).  Here’s something I cooked up in about 45 seconds:

I’m sure you can all make something more interesting, so don’t forget to post your efforts either to the WebCT Discussion Board or as a comment here!  I can’t wait to see what you all come up with!

From Audience to Agency…

This week we’ve been thinking about audiences, reception and agency.  In Sue Turnbull’s article, she talks about fans and fan production.  To spur your thinking on this front, take a look at this 10 minutes fan-produced Star Wars and COPS fusion parody:

Troops, incidentally, is widely regarded as one of the first great fan films.  You read more about it in Wired and in the Wikipedia.  Think about the sort of Star Wars audience that created this film – how active are they, and how do they see their agency in relation to the Star Wars franchise?

Internet People!

In this week’s tutorials we’ve been talking about how celebrity and self are related, especially in terms of the way celebrity is a much more fluid and attainable idea.  A lot of people have cited YouTube celebrities as examples of ‘celetoids’, but this little video makes that process even more visible as it playfully lists almost one hundred recent internet-facilitated ‘celebrity’ moments.  How many can you recall?

You can download this video for your iPods by clicking here.

Apple 1984 Clips

In Chantal’s lecture on audiences, she played a couple of media clips, the first of which was the famous Ridley Scott 1984 advertisement which was broadcast only oncem during the 1984 US Superbowl:

[Source: http://youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8]

Also of interest is the fact that Apple updated this advertisment for their 20th Anniversary in 2004 (can you see what’s different in this version?):

[Source: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zew1bb5Sxk4]

Finally, a recent mashup of the 1984 ad with images from contemporary US politics caused a stir earlier this year when supporters of Barack Obama created this clip which features Hilary Clinton in the role of Big Brother:

[Source: http://youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo] If you’d like to know more about this clip, read more here.

Also played in the audiences lecture was this EPIC clip:

[Source: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dKWK3xfvs-k] This was originally a Flash animation – how well do you think they used Flash for this clip?

Remember, you can use Vixy.net to convert any of these YouTube files into an .mp4 file to play on your video iPods!

‘Know Thyself’ (through online personality tests!)

The tasks for this week’s tutorials on ‘Self’ include two personality tests one more or less serious, one decidedly silly.  The ‘Similar Minds’ test, based on the traits material for this week.  To save you the trouble of typing them, I’ve decided to link to the tests from here and, for your amusement or interest, I’ll post my results.  For the first Similar Minds test, here’s my result:

Global Personality Test Results

Stability (43%) moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious. Orderliness (66%) moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly organized, reliable, neat, and hard working at the expense of flexibility, efficiency, spontaneity, and fun. Extraversion (50%) medium which suggests you average somewhere in between being assertive and social and being withdrawn and solitary.

Take Free Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

I can’t say that seems overly accurate to me!

The second, far more fun test, is the Sesame Street Personality Test.  Here’s what I got:

You Are Bert

Extremely serious and a little eccentric, people find you loveable – even if you don’t love them! You are usually feeling: Logical – you rarely let your emotions rule you You are famous for: Being smart, a total neat freak, and maybe just a little evil How you life your life: With passion, even if your odd passions (like bottle caps and pigeons) are baffling to others

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Let’s just hope you don’t get Snuffleupagous!

Animator vs. Animation (A Flash Animation)

As you all start to enjoy Flash, you may hit one or two moments where Flash is a little uncooperative. In such cases, this little flash animation from Alan Becker might just make you feel better …

(Click the centre of the screen and the video will open in a new window.)

Update: As Kylie Timpani points out in the comments, Animator Vs Animation II is pretty good as well!

Coffee-flavoured representations?

For this week’s tutorials you’re asked to create a representation of coffee in any medium you like.  When I was in Florence a few months ago with my lovely wife on our honeymoon, one of the little pleasures was the fantastic coffee we found.  Here’s one shot which illustrates the joy of proper Italian coffee being savoured in Florence:

This might also be a good time to mention that another thing you could do with your iPods is upload photos and other images and create slideshows.  You simply pop your images in a particular directory, tell iTunes where that directory is, and it’ll create a slideshow for you.  For more details instructions, click here and here.

If, on the other hand, you prefer your coffee representations a lot sillier, this Folger’s coffee advertisement is one of the more creative (and catchier) efforts I’ve seen in a long time:

Be warned, though, you’ll find yourself humming the tune if you watch that video!