Photograph Project

Today in class we covered the history of photography and were assigned a project in which we have to look up a group of 15 photographs that we like and evaluate them based on certain criteria. It's an interesting project, especially for me since I haven't really ever thought about photography much before. I know the basic stuff from my film classes like aperture and depth of field and all that but I've never looked at it from the art side.

One thing I guess I've noticed so far is that I haven't been looking at film from that perspective. I've always thought film more closely related to literature than photography, but if you want to get technical that's far from the case. I knew I was more interested in narratology, especially since I was hoping to move into studying video games from that perspective, but photography is pretty cool too.

I always admired the style of film noir so I think I might choose for my project those series of pictures from Naked City by Weegee. I love that style, chiaroscuro it's called. There's good stuff in that book, I'll definitely find more than enough examples of shadow. Anyway, I'm going to check out some of that stuff and start posting it in the next couple of days. Also, work continues on my personal website, I'll be going live any time now (I hope).

Group Work

Well our first group project is finally all done and I have to say it turned out really nicely.  I did the voice-over work, albeit a tad grudgingly (everyone says they hate to hear their own voice but I can't imagine anyone does as much as me).  My groupies were great and did some amazing work for the images and powerpoint.  I hope our presentation goes as smoothly as the work for it did.

My Blog (2.0)

I've decided to bite the bullet and buy my own domain name, where I will move my blog for Media Practices and set up a shamelessly self-promotional space as well.  We have to create a website for Understanding Media so I figured why not kill two birds with one stone.  I'm completely new to web design as I mentioned earlier, so this will be a good experiment as well.  

I spent the better part of two hours (seriously) just trying different names that I thought would be appropriate.  Some sounded too stuffy or overreaching, others too goofy (although I have to admit, had dangerousgaming.com been available we wouldn't be having this conversation).  I finally came across thegamewriter.com which stuck.  I really wanted a .com, I'm not altogether sure why.  Anyway, like I said, the site will be a repository of all my work at The New School (I'll throw in some of my old stuff from VT for now, we'll see if that seems to bad later on).  

I'll also include an area for my professional writing that I did for GotGame and Dootsi.  And I'm thinking about a members-only space to include my event calender for my mom.  I'm going to need to find some good pictures of myself to include, maybe after I learn to use photoshop.  The ones from my college facebook account probably wouldn't do.

Web 2.0

I hadn't seen this video before and have to say it was very inspiring.  I've always been interested in new communication technologies and the web is (still) the most rapidly evolving form of new comm tech.  I've only really dabbled my toes in web design so far - although that's about to change very soon and I'll talk more about that later - but I would really love to become more involved in it.  

Watching the video inspired me to look up the Web 2.0 movement.  Of course I used one of the greatest, if not most accurate, tools on the web - the all knowing Wikipedia.  I browsed through the main article and followed up on another topic of interest to me: the anti-copywrite movement.  It's an interesting idea and their war cry - information wants to be free - is great.  

I'm not sure about how to encourage creators to give up their right to full ownership of their work but discouraging printing companies and record labels from owning rights to work is a fantastic idea.  Kudos to all the professionals who make their work available for free though alternate means of publishing, I only hope people don't end up getting burned by people using their material without giving credit where credit is due.  Right now the 2.0 movement seems a bit overly optimistic.