• Why did typefaces shift from primarily blackletter to Roman? Does typeface make a difference in the impact of the message it visualizes? Give an example.
• Wysocki provides several examples for analysis in her essay–a magazine, a computer game, an instructional website, a book. A computer game seemingly differs from these in that it aims only to provide entertainment (versus persuasion toward a specific message/viewpoint, as in the textual examples). Should we include video/computer games on this list of visual representations of text? Why or why not?
• Wysocki asks whether the pages we design for each other should be designed in such a way as to promote the questioning she espouses throughout her essay. Should they, or should they not? Why? Does it matter?

Questions on the McCloud and Berger essays:

• How does McCloud define the term “icon”?
• Who developed the idea of mystification? What is it, and how does Berger apply it to art and reproduction of art?
• How does Berger relate the ideas of publicity and oil painting? How do they affect us as potential consumers/buyers (and of course, spectators)?

Examples of sequential art:
Anders Loves Maria
Sin Titulo

Pre-production: This was probably the most difficult part of creating the film. Our group had one initial idea for a film on the first in-class day we had to work on the assignment. After giving it some thought over the weekend, we came back to the second in-class work day with a totally different idea based on simplicity of shooting. Originally, we had considered Fight Club, but we thought Dodgeball would be explicitly funnier (versus the gravity of Fight Club) due to the lack of people we had to shoot with and the film’s original plot.

From there, we wrote out a summary of the movie into general scenes, trying to capture the most important pieces of the plot (versus just the especially amusing parts of the film). As we wrote each scene description, we mapped out what objects were necessary to the scene and what props we would need to supply. We wanted our movie to be a recognizable approximation of the original film, at least it appears from the choices we made as to what scenes were originally listed. What follows is the original brainstorm list Danny compiled as we talked as a group during class.

Scene 1: Kate enters Peter’s office and tells him that he has defaulted on his gym’s mortgage, and that if he does not pay 50000 dollars in 30 days, his gym goes to White (Office)
Scene 2: Peter and White talk. White expresses happiness about defaulted mortgage. (Gym)
Scene 3: Peter and gang decide after failed car wash that Dodgeball tournament is the only solution to keep the gym (Room)
Scene 4: Peter and Gang play Girl scouts and lose; however, girl scouts disqualified for beaver tranquilizers. (Dodgeball)
Scene 5: Patches O’Houlihan trains Peter and Gang (Cardboard D’s montage, GYM)
Scene 6: Kate joins team; White enters tournament (Bar)
Scene 7: Average Joes beat teams, so does Purple Cobras; During celebration, Patches dies
Scene 8: White offers peter 100000 for deed, he accepts. Team dissolves, and reconnects and chuck Norris lets them play post forfeit.
Scene 9: Teams play, down to peter and white. White hits peter but steps on line; sudden death
Scene 10: Peter hits White, both gyms are his as he bet the 100000 on his team to win, won 5000000.

Props:
Magazine (Chelsea)
Makeup (Chelsea)
Cardboard (Davis)
Hammer (Steven)
Jerseys (Steven)
White tees (Steven)
Cash and Change (All)
Balls (Any and all)
Water Bottles (all)
Towel (All)
Suitcase (Chelsea)
Locations:
Gym (Allen)
Home/Office (Allen)
Bar (Allen)
Room (Allen)
Dodgeball stadium (Parking Garage across Allen)

Shooting: Shooting what would eventually be cut to just over seven minutes of movie took almost four hours. Steven and Davis made signs for the training montage scene while we waited for Danny to arrive. We spent between two-and-a-half and three hours in the parking garage across from Allen alone, shooting the dodgeball playing scenes and working out how to use my car stereo to create a soundtrack. We also took the initial scenes a lot more seriously as far as how to shoot them–we talked down each scene before as we got ready to shoot it, which took a lot of time and I think took away from the spontaneity of the versions of Ghostbusters and Rush Hour 2 shot in Be Kind Rewind. It was really interesting that the office scenes took so much less time to shoot–we were much better about ad-libbing, and the mistakes as they happened were much funnier.

We primarily used the tripod for filming, so we could have the camera person running in and out of scenes easily. We also used a lot of swift on-and-off recording to cut scenes as they were filmed.

Editing: I took care of all the editing, since we had to shoot our movie in one night due to my schedule. Editing was actually quite easy, especially since we were instructed to leave the movie as intact as possible. All I did in iMovie was put the scenes in order (we shot the dodgeball scenes first and moved inside for the office scenes, which actually come first in the plot’s chronology, and the sudden death round, which is at the very end) and cut out some things to get the film down to time (the original is about nine minutes and 21 seconds, the class version is just over seven minutes). In cutting, I took things out that didn’t contribute to the plot (as mentioned in pre-production–we stuck very, very heavily to repurposing the plot versus the more humorous or explicitly impossible parts of the film)–Steven bringing in our “new team jerseys,” Davis doing a full announcement that Average Joe’s won the invitational match, and half of both the intro office scene featuring Steven and me and the brainstorm scene.

Post-production/critique: It was interesting to see the different dynamics between the other sweded films that were made and our version of Dodgeball. 3 jumped right into tackling completely unmanageable scenes knowing that they would be that much funnier, which, in retrospect, is perhaps what we should have done. I think we ended up being a little too concerned with fitting the entire plot into seven minutes. Given that Hannah mentioned that she hadn’t seen the movie before, however, I do give us a little bit of credit. As a whole, I think our film turned out a little boring–the set-up for the film required too much talking, which we should have just pared down to short announcement scenes instead of trying to replicate the actual scenes from the original movie. As I considered in a previous post, remediation deals very heavily with the enjoyment of the audience–something I don’t think we took into account as much as we should have.

This happens frequently with my cell phone. It’s a Samsung A437, by no means a fancy phone, but a mid-sized flip phone that does what I need it to do. Sometimes when I’m holding it in my hands, I’m overwhelmed by its weight–for its size, it’s relatively dense, heavy. But its size also surprises me, as it is really such a tiny, solid thing to be carrying around with me. It’s the same size as someone’s billfold, memo pad. It is a tiny thing that contributes significantly to my daily activities, a bitty portable thing that connects me to people who are thousands of miles from me in the blink of an eye.

“What do you think of Elkin’s idea of studying ordinary objects and Drucker’s notion of ‘language in the landscape’?”

Elkins’s idea of noticing the unnoticed partially corresponds with Drucker’s piece as a whole. “Language in the landscape” is something that we tend to accept with dissecting, interpret without consciously registering it. Drucker’s argument, however, is that “language in the landscape” is different than “language as landscape.” “Language as landscape” connotes that language is indeed part of the background, but functions purely as a backdrop, not really something that influences our instant interpretation of something we see. “Language in the landscape” suggests that though it is still part of the backdrop, language is something separate within it that still has the ability to affect our perception. Elkins’s desire to study ordinary objects seems more about appreciation versus an effort at decoding unnoticed influences: examine his discussion of grass versus Drucker’s discussion of the presence and non-presence of a sign on a fence. He seems more concerned with human emotional responses, different from Drucker’s theory that unnoticed language deals more with manipulation (of not only emotions but behaviors).

Auto-Tune the News: “The only news you need has a bass line”

OverClocked Remix: “Founded in 1999, OverClocked ReMix is an organization dedicated to the appreciation, preservation, and interpretation of video game music. Its primary focus is www.ocremix.org, a website featuring hundreds of free fan arrangements, information on game music and composers, resources for aspiring artists, and a thriving community of video game music fans.”

Though Auto-Tune the News is devoted in particular to humor through remediation (repurposing of news presentation and of news content, as well as the prevalent usage of auto-tune in popular music) and OverClocked Remix attempts to archive video game music and foster its acceptance as a valid musical art form, their remediation seems to come from one thing in particular: personal enjoyment. Auto-Tune the News attempts to make people laugh through its very overt repurposing of content. OverClocked Remix allows video game music advocates and fans to express their appreciation through creative remediation (remixing), their respective repurposings deal directly with meeting the desires of their spectators–the desire to laugh, to enjoy good music, to find celebration in music we love. In neither case is it necessarily about remediating as a means of critical or theoretical interpretation, it’s not really about making a point. Remediation in everyday life seems to stem purely from want of pleasure.

This graffiti is located on an emergency contact pole just beyond the north end of the stone walkway that goes into Illini Grove in Urbana. It stands on one side of the sidewalk path that goes straight between the Grove and the tennis courts as you walk south, parallel to Dorner. One of the tall light poles further south down the sidewalk also bears the same graffiti, suggesting that a stencil has been used.

I imagine that a woman student who is in the area frequently (someone who lived in LAR, Allen, FAR, or PAR; someone who plays tennis frequently or spends time in Illini Grove) probably did it, not explicitly because it address rape, but because it is a kind of reclaiming of the pathway between Illini Grove and the courts. It’s a standard path for people to take at night coming from places like Allen or LAR to walk to Late Night at PAR, and one that is admittedly a little creepy if you’re walking it alone late at night. It’s significant, then, that the graffiti is on the emergency contact pole (intended in part to keep sexual assault from happening) and a light pole–things that protect and illuminate the area and lend a sense of comfort and safety. The graffiti to me, then, says, “We are fighting things like this, and this should be and is a safe place for you to walk, no matter the time or your gender”–a reclamation of a once-”dangerous” place.

The reading mentions USA Today’s layout as an example of the prevalence of hypermediacy in the newspaper industry. The page itself includes various media that attempt to approximate another 3-D space (in photographs) while drawing on the media of the past (pamphlets, early print periodicals, bulletins) noticeably (a sort of remediation). In particular, the layout of the page reflects hypermediacy–spaces are apportioned across the page in a way similarly to interface windows on a computer. Its scattered and collage-like presentation also draws from things like photomontage and Dadaism.

Remediation is somewhat defined as “taking a ‘property’ from one medium and reuse it in another. With reuse comes a necessary redefinition, but there may be no conscious interplay between media. The interplay happens, if at all, only for the reader or viewer who happens to know both versions and can compare them” (45). The sweded project purposefully acknowledges that interplay is happening, should be happening. To take the same plot for the film and repurpose it, for us, is to make a concerted effort toward interplay. Our goal is get people to recognize the original film versus someone else in the class knowing it offhand. We’ll likely try to replicate explicitly recognizable scenes in order to purposely shoot them differently. But the remediation aspect of our particular project also involves adding elements of creativity and emotion. We must attempt to answer the question  “What does this film mean to us, and what does it mean to our classmates?” through our interpretation, while also tweaking integral parts of the movie to reflect our desires as viewers of the “real film”–what did we want to happen differently? Why? What would have been more satisfying to us as not only viewers, but active participants in the story presented by the film? In our circumstances, remediation is a recycling of property while consciously encouraging interplay between the original and the new in an attempt to infuse it with personal significance.

• What does GUI stand for, and how does its “triumph” in personal computing illustrate our increasing desire for immediacy?
• How have painting, early photography, and digital graphics attempted to deal with the issue of transparency?
• Does remediation relate more to the concept of immediacy or hypermediacy? Why? What are some examples that support your conclusions?

Ownership is probably the most interesting topic of the three. What I identify as the central issue of the “bust” of Be Kind Rewind is not that the films were re-shot, but that they were used to generate private profit. I don’t know that it’s necessarily an infringement of copyright law to simply reshoot a film using the title and plot of the original so long as it is used for recreational/educational purposes without the intent of generating profit.

What lies at the heart of the issue of ownership is the intersection of “art” and “copyright.” This is what motivated the suit-countersuit battle between the Shepard Fairey and the Associated Press, EMI’s heated response to Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, and Anne Rice’s personal statement against fan fiction, among a vast number of other incidents.

How do we “copyright” ideas, art? How much is art based on alternative views of shared ideas? Can anything truly be copyrighted? It also begs the question of what in a film is copyrighted. Is it actually what we view–the scene itself, the shot, the images of the actors? Is it the script–0nly the text? Why is it illegal to imitate a musical rift in a song or, in the case of Be Kind Rewind, only vaguely approximate the plot of a film, but it’s perfectly all right to sell an endless list of “fan fiction” based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?

So what is a sweded film, then? From Be Kind Rewind, we could say that it’s a cheaply produced, homemade, unedited film. But is it one that takes its premise from another film by its very nature? As the community collaborates to create their interpretation of Fats Waller’s life, they’re inventing an original film for the love of filmmaking. Given how Jack Black’s character comes up with “sweding” (inventing it when talking with the large group of guys standing at the counter), it seems to pertain only to the creation of “cheaply produced, homemade, unedited” versions or takes on pre-existing films. Even if the sweded films hadn’t been rented, would their mere existence serve as copyright infringement or art? After all, art can be satire, and satire can qualify as art. Where do we draw the line between “copyrightable text” and “original interpretation”?