Gollum’s MTV Awards Appearance

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

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.

‘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!

The iPhone Shuffle?

What happens when convergence, miniturization and Apple-level cuteness get too much?

The iPhone Shuffle! (Don’t forget, you can Vixy this link – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnsQpcNvpE – to convert this YouTube clip into an mp4 that can play on your iPod!)

Thanks Chantal!