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!