Frustration with technology and other things...

Experimenting to decide whether to use flv or mov was much more harder than first thought. I swear the computers in University know when I'm trying to do something important because they never work!!!!

I'm swaying with using mov files at the moment as using Flash would cause more unnecessary and unwanted problems. In the meantime, I will attempt to experiment again, hopefully it will successful this time and will post the results in the next week or so!

Moving on from technical issues, I've secured a voice-over for the motion comic. I believe the motion comic will need a voice over to engage the audience instead of text and images on screen. This will be recorded over the next week or so, and I will post the script on the blog, once finished!

Looking back to the days of producing the pilot and things have changed drastically (but for the good!)

Here's the image I've created in Photoshop for the Homepage of the website:

I'm really pleased with the design as it's enigmatic, bold and intriguing especially the text 'The blind road to Media Control'. I found the below images through a search engine as I had an idea of what I wanted to create; a symbolism of being silenced and not heard...

To create the image for the Homepage, I experimented in Photoshop with the following filters:

Filters> Artistic> Cutout

Filters> Sharpen



And came up with this:

It reminds me of the image used in The Corporation:



Again this week, I've been thinking about the layout of the website and how the motion comic will be displayed within it. I wanted to include an element of user interactivity within the website as again, this will engage the user. The interactivity will be introduced through a second navigation bar which will allow the user to move through the motion comic chapters. I've incorporated 2 ways that the user can choose to do this:

Either

• Go to the navigation bar at the top of the page and choose the chapter from the drop down list
• Or click on the links 'go back' or 'next' which will then load a new webpage with the next chapter in a mov file.

Thinking again about the layout of chapters, I've decided on using a mov file for each chapter. Currently, I'm planning on using 4 chapters within the motion comic, each chapter averaging about 2 minutes in length each. Altogether providing 8 minutes or so of motion comic and around 10 minutes or so in user experience.

Currently my chapter titles are:

• Chapter 1: In the Beginning
• Chapter 2: Economical Consent
• Chapter 3: Media Control and I
• Chapter 4: Alone

I'm currently working on the background sound of the Homepage, as the sound I used for the Pilot (although I liked it) needs some work and improvement.

Critical and Challenging Engagement...

A few weeks ago, I began to think critically about my production piece and what it is I am trying to achieve and understanding where my project sits on a media scale:

This is what I came up with:

My project acts as a social commentary/ critique on media control and the influences of, it in this I mean PR, advertising and more prominantly the News within contemporary society, through the form of a motion comic.

So what is my critical and challenging approach to theme and method?

Firstly, I'm challenging my own practical skills in:

• Dreamweaver
• Final Cut Pro
• Photoshop
• Flash

By deciding to present my production piece through the form of a motion comic, I'm incorporating a playful interpretation which I would not have been able to achieve if I had chosen film. Using motion comic conventions, I will incorporate a ficitional narrative which can loosely be related to Western society today where the user will hopefully recognise the extremities of media control, as it is quite prevelant in our contemporary society.  Similar to A Scanner Darkly, it will have capabilities that would surpass the medium of film. To use the form of a motion comic, it removes a certain level of realism that film would have. Challenging the idea of Media Control, is one stemmed from cynicism and reading the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Bernays and of course watching such documentaries like The Corporation (not intiarlley related but close enough) and Adam Curtis' Century of the Self series. I find the term Media Control fitting for the purpose of my production piece as personally, I find the term stems from certain feelings of what we as society know or learn; the majority of what we know and learn is through the media. We learn about the world through the News. Which I find increasingly worrying, as there is an element of manipulation that enables the media to have the upper hand, they can make what they like up about the world we inhabit, and you know what, the majority of us wouldn't question it; we take it as truth.   

'Having media moguls dominate the British media is deeply unhelpful'

An extremely useful piece of news media which I plan on incorporating into my project.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14266696

Photo shoot Images

Here's a few of my favoured images I took during 2 photo shoots. Extremely pleased with the outcome as compared to my pilot where I greenscreened my images together, taking my own images I was able to manipulate the space to encorporate depth of field, different shots so that it is visually interesting too!

However, I'm aware that the photos I took are not all landscape (I had this in mind throughout). I chose to take horizontal images as I felt that some photos looked much better horizontally than in landscape. To tackle this when I come to importing into Final Cut Pro is to either crop them to size or my preferred plan of action is to add in 2 black strips (bars) into Final Cut Pro so that the visual is consistent throughout and the images aren't jumping between a landscape, then horizontal etc and changing the composition.


Here's some of my images;

I'm also going to experiment with Flash and Final Cut Pro to compare the quality of a selection of exported images (experiment page to come!).



Future POA in the next week;

• Finalize script (to be uploaded)
• Finalize layout of website (to be uploaded)
• Finalize sound for homepage
• Be organized and prioritize!