I'd originally intended this blog to be strictly about blogging, the idea being that focused writing is better writing. But I don't see the harm in making this blog about media in general, so here are some thoughts on advertising.
First, there are motives. Let's assume that some advertising annoys people every now and then, or at least isn't as entertaining as most other forms of entertainment. Maybe it isn't annoying enough to make you change the station/website, but given the choice to go without it, you would. The economic incentives that more and more websites are offering for ad-free versions of sites are evidence of this demand. Let's also assume that companies want to sell as many products as possible while spending as little as possible on advertising. Advertising companies, on the other hand, would rather have these companies that actually produce things to pay for MORE advertising, therefore they will try to justify their existence and will try to expand advertising in whatever ways possible.
So, wouldn't a minimalist ad campaign benefit the consumer and the company that produces the goods? Is a 30-second TV spot or a flashing banner the most effective way to get people to buy your goods? Why couldn't one company create a 10 second ad or a slender, unadorned banner ad that says to consumers, "if you want less distracting advertising and the better entertainment experience that would result from that, then buy our product. If you don't buy our product, you are, in effect, voting for more distracting advertising and shittier content." If this worked, then other companies would follow suit.
Getting the consumer's attention is good. Getting them annoyed is bad. There's no distinction being made between attention and distraction in a lot of web advertising. Perhaps the web allows companies that produce goods to do an end-run around the advertising companies to go directly to the consumers. Much the same way the web rendered old-school record companies obsolete via social networking sites. Companies and the indivuals who work for them will fight for their livelyhoods by insisting that they're indispensible. But this refusal to evolve is to be expected, and has nothing to do with the effectiveness of ads or the economic necessity of a billion dollar ad industry.
As more and more websites tinker with how to generate revenue, the future of entertainment looks to be less like films and HBO and more like the shitty network TV everyone loves to dump on. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to this rule, but still, I would argue that there is a correlation between the lasting entertainment value of any cultural object and whether or not it is created for ad-supported media.
Perhaps this will encourage more...insidious forms of advertising, namely viral marketing, and maybe that's not such a good thing. Maybe our future will involve trying to deduce whether or not any conversation we're having with anyone is an attempt to sell us something, and so the distractions of our entertainment experiences will invade our social lives (spam is just the beginning). I'm willing to debate this point. I honestly don't have a strong opinion about it right now. Maybe this is the future and maybe its shittier than our present. But I just can't accept the horrible obsolescence of advertising as it is.
It also might make for more entertaining ads, and one could argue that since the inception of TiVo, this has already started to happen. Here's the easiest way to tell: if you give people the technology to easily bypass ads, are they still watching them? I have no problem with entertaining ads, and there are plenty of them. The real problem, as I see it, is the distraction factor. If you have a half-hour lunch break to go to your favorite online video website, you'd rather not spend most of those 30 minutes trying to filter through information deciding what's an ad and what's not. You just want to relax and be entertained. Perhaps you'd like to be informed of products that you might want to buy, but that is NOT the same thing as spending time filtering through distracting information looking for useful nuggets, which is what many of us spend countless hours doing.
I'm actually trying to watch football while writing this, and I've seen about 30 car ads even though I have no intention of buying a new car in the next 5 years. Yes, I accept the premise that these ads have some subliminal effect on subsequent purchasing decisions. Because I've seen so many Chevy ads, I'll think of them instead of Saturn (who doesn't advertise as much on the programs/websites I go to) the next time I'm considering buying a car. Ads serve a purpose in our economy. They are not worthless. But their worth has to be weighed against the cost they exact on our ability to function otherwise.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Friday, November 10, 2006
What kind of a sucker do you take me for?
Lonelygirl15 doesn't seem to be a fluke, in the sense that many other vlogs are posted by ambiguously "real" personalities. Its impossible to tell to what degree people are putting on an act. Perhaps part of what keeps viewers coming back to such videos is the game of trying to figure out who the poster REALLY is - a bit like the pleasure of watching a mystery. They watch the videos, look for cracks in the facade, and try to figure out the motives of the poster. Its not a black-and-white "are they confessing or are they acting" question, but rather - what aspects of the poster's persona are real, which ones are fake, and WHY is the poster being fake in that way. Presumably, they are being fake in that way to boost their ratings, or perhaps to feel superior to the viewers ("ha ha, I fooled you" type of thing). To try to figure out one of these could-be-real-could-be-fake vloggers is to try to understand how creators view their audiences. If they think they can fool us, how are they trying to fool us? Its a bit of a competition between creator and audience, and I don't see this game ending anytime soon.
Blogs as conversation and lasting art
After reading some of my students' blog entries about blogs they had read, I was reminded about something intriguing about blogs in general: they're ambiguous status as personal conversation/confessional OR as a lasting statement about life, akin to a novel. Granted, most blogs are of the former kind - gut-spilling for the benefit of a select few (usually real-world friends), but I like the fact that there could be profound writing hidden among these entries, and that they are not explicitly marked as "literature" or "art." It could be one particularly interesting, well-written entry in an otherwise self-indulgent confessional blog - great writing is great writing, and to me, its almost "greater" or perhaps somehow more authentic when its not in a published anthology or in a well-known novel. Its the ambiguous status of personal blogs that keeps the blogosphere interesting to me. For this reason, I hope that people don't just see blogs as a way to refer people to interesting news sites on CNN.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Today's desperate artist's only choice: to masquerade as Truth.
Systematic, prolonged deception is not only possible on the Internet, but it has become increasingly easy and inexpensive. Every single one of the blogs on this site or any other site could have originated from a single source or a souce that holds the opposite opinions of those expressed in the posts. Like message boards, online video distributors (e.g. YouTube), and pretty much every other participatory website, this site allows a single user to impersonate any number or variety of other people.
We can be reasonably sure the news we receive on the web is real, NYTimes, CNN, and all the rest being longstanding, reliable sources with a lot to lose if their reputation is besmirched. The Internet as news source is not what’s at stake, but rather the Internet as a social space. You can “triangulate” the truth by looking at many different website’s accounts of a news event. You cannot do this with the intimate lives or opinions of individuals. There are plenty of old fogies who do not use the Internet as a social space who would like to dismiss identity play as unimportant merely b/c it doesn’t effect them or anyone they know. But last time I checked, there were millions of young people all over the world using the Internet as a social space.
It may not take much $ to deceive people on the Internet, but it takes time and creativity, both in short supply for most. You’ve got to have something to sell to make it worth the time, unless you’re just trying to prove a point. It is this apparently motiveless mass deception that is the true new art form that lonelygirl15 portends. Think of it as experimental theater, as the next big step in the erosion of the barrier between art and life.
For those who continue to doubt the relevance of this, consider the obvious political implications of phony personas. If personas are easier to fake, then the grassroots democratic nature of the Internet could be partially or completely illusory.
Normally, I wouldn't quote something at great length, but this post is buried amongst others:
emjo on NYTimes Screens blog:
"Rewind to the 17th century, and the birth of the novel in the Christian west. In its early manifestations, the form relied on the popular convention of make-believe truthfulness — “found” Arabic manuscripts in Don Quixote, “discovered” correspondences between dead lovers in any number of epistolary novels, and so on. Back then, fiction was lies, and lies were immoral — but everyone new these books weren’t really the real truth. It was originally perhaps a symbolic, but obligatory, nod to the atmosphere of religious censorship, plus there is that extra shivery bit of pleasure from imagining that a story MIGHT be true. See also more contemporary examples — Nabokov’s “Lolita,” for example. Enter reality T.V., and, shortly after, literary identity scandals like James Frey and J.T. LeRoy. This is a little bit different–the assumption is that audiences will be more interested (will perhaps ONLY be interested) if they REALLY BELIEVE that the stories they’re hearing/seeing are true...[For those who doubt the revelance of LG15 and the like], do we really not care anymore about anything but the material facts of our world–particularly those facts that put us in bodily danger? Is imagination a waste of time? Is fiction immoral?
Maybe on our journey back towards the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades, we are finding new ways to push art to the margins. Global terrorism, by god! We have no time to waste on childish make-believe! I can understand how artists desperate to get our attention might feel that their only choice is to masquerade as Truth. Unfortunately, this compromise is dangerous and demeaning. So what to do? Do the narrative arts continue to become more polarized — either popular, soothing, and meaningless, or powerful, brilliant, and obscure? Do more and more theater, film, and fiction artists turn to fake reality? Or do we as audiences give the imagination the space it deserves, to interpret and represent aspects of experience that can’t be fought with wars and bombs?"
http://screens.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=77#comment-935
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/weekinreview/17zeller.html?ref=weekinreview
We can be reasonably sure the news we receive on the web is real, NYTimes, CNN, and all the rest being longstanding, reliable sources with a lot to lose if their reputation is besmirched. The Internet as news source is not what’s at stake, but rather the Internet as a social space. You can “triangulate” the truth by looking at many different website’s accounts of a news event. You cannot do this with the intimate lives or opinions of individuals. There are plenty of old fogies who do not use the Internet as a social space who would like to dismiss identity play as unimportant merely b/c it doesn’t effect them or anyone they know. But last time I checked, there were millions of young people all over the world using the Internet as a social space.
It may not take much $ to deceive people on the Internet, but it takes time and creativity, both in short supply for most. You’ve got to have something to sell to make it worth the time, unless you’re just trying to prove a point. It is this apparently motiveless mass deception that is the true new art form that lonelygirl15 portends. Think of it as experimental theater, as the next big step in the erosion of the barrier between art and life.
For those who continue to doubt the relevance of this, consider the obvious political implications of phony personas. If personas are easier to fake, then the grassroots democratic nature of the Internet could be partially or completely illusory.
Normally, I wouldn't quote something at great length, but this post is buried amongst others:
emjo on NYTimes Screens blog:
"Rewind to the 17th century, and the birth of the novel in the Christian west. In its early manifestations, the form relied on the popular convention of make-believe truthfulness — “found” Arabic manuscripts in Don Quixote, “discovered” correspondences between dead lovers in any number of epistolary novels, and so on. Back then, fiction was lies, and lies were immoral — but everyone new these books weren’t really the real truth. It was originally perhaps a symbolic, but obligatory, nod to the atmosphere of religious censorship, plus there is that extra shivery bit of pleasure from imagining that a story MIGHT be true. See also more contemporary examples — Nabokov’s “Lolita,” for example. Enter reality T.V., and, shortly after, literary identity scandals like James Frey and J.T. LeRoy. This is a little bit different–the assumption is that audiences will be more interested (will perhaps ONLY be interested) if they REALLY BELIEVE that the stories they’re hearing/seeing are true...[For those who doubt the revelance of LG15 and the like], do we really not care anymore about anything but the material facts of our world–particularly those facts that put us in bodily danger? Is imagination a waste of time? Is fiction immoral?
Maybe on our journey back towards the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades, we are finding new ways to push art to the margins. Global terrorism, by god! We have no time to waste on childish make-believe! I can understand how artists desperate to get our attention might feel that their only choice is to masquerade as Truth. Unfortunately, this compromise is dangerous and demeaning. So what to do? Do the narrative arts continue to become more polarized — either popular, soothing, and meaningless, or powerful, brilliant, and obscure? Do more and more theater, film, and fiction artists turn to fake reality? Or do we as audiences give the imagination the space it deserves, to interpret and represent aspects of experience that can’t be fought with wars and bombs?"
http://screens.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=77#comment-935
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/weekinreview/17zeller.html?ref=weekinreview
Friday, September 15, 2006
Fake Blogs, Fake Vlogs, and Verisimilitude
More on Lonleygirl15...
Many artists aspire to create the most realistic art they can. Many see the arts on a steady tragectory towards art that is indistinguishable from reality. So, is Lonelygirl15 and other blogs or vlogs that are fictional the next step towards verisimilitude? Do those who fee lied to have any more of an ethical beef than people who were originally tricked into believing early films were "real?" As I recall, Lonelygirl15's creators never explicitly claimed to be non-fiction. They simply took advantage of an audience's preconceived notions of a medium.
Many artists aspire to create the most realistic art they can. Many see the arts on a steady tragectory towards art that is indistinguishable from reality. So, is Lonelygirl15 and other blogs or vlogs that are fictional the next step towards verisimilitude? Do those who fee lied to have any more of an ethical beef than people who were originally tricked into believing early films were "real?" As I recall, Lonelygirl15's creators never explicitly claimed to be non-fiction. They simply took advantage of an audience's preconceived notions of a medium.
Friday, September 08, 2006
the birth of a new art form
call me crazy, but I believe "The Creators" when, after the (apparent) revelation that Lonleygirl15 is not "real," they declared the birth of a new art form. In terms of medium specificity, I think they have a point (although its dopey to think of the Internet as a single medium at this point, as it fulfills so many different fuctions for so many different people) - one of the walls that the internet was destined to break down, along with the walls between public/private and public/celebrity, was the wall between fiction and realtiy.
I guess you could draw parellels to "War of Worlds" or "Quiz Show," mass media deceptions on a much larger scale. Like everything online, this only affects a minute portion of the public. But still, the same principles apply. And so we might think that, just as War of the Worlds was to radio and the quiz show that inspire the movie Quiz Show was to TV, this is to the Internet (or at least autobiographic blogging, vlogging, and podcasting). In other words, there comes a time in the evolution of any medium where the audience is forced to confront the fact that the medium can be used for mass deception. They are forced to become critical of it. Again, this only applies to aspects of the Internet (primarily those that ape aspects of "traditional media" like YouTube does to TV. But the same can be said about autobiographic blogs.
loneleygirl15 is real in the sense that the person who is on screen is almost certainly real, and she is real in the sense that the sentiments that she expresses, the motives that inform those sentiments, are both from another real person (or perhaps several real people) - the Creators. It is possible that The Creators is just a computer program that analyzes autobiographic blogs, pulls recurring themes, sentiments, and motives and weaves those into a story (unlikely considering how unsophisticated AI is rright now, but in principle, such a program, with minor human assistance, could exist soon).
Is lonelygirl15 any less real than the coached personalities on Laguna Beach? What if those personalities weren't coached? Would that, then, be real? By "real," I suppose we mean that the actions of a person are motivated by only them, and not other forces, or that at least those other forces pass through the filter of that person. It would be better if Bree was "real" in the sense that she, like the characters on Laguna Beach and the Hills, had a pre-existing life that was dicovered by producers and then shaped to suit dramatic needs. There could never be any definitive unmasking. There would never really be any lying. It would be impossible to fix the line between reality and fiction. They (or she) might have been coached, and her behavior might have been altered, but it is impossible to say to what degree and in what way.
We all put on some sort of a performance to garner attention, in our writings and our behavior. What makes us real?
So this is all some combination of Andy Kaufman and Andy Warhol. And at least for now, it feels new.
I guess you could draw parellels to "War of Worlds" or "Quiz Show," mass media deceptions on a much larger scale. Like everything online, this only affects a minute portion of the public. But still, the same principles apply. And so we might think that, just as War of the Worlds was to radio and the quiz show that inspire the movie Quiz Show was to TV, this is to the Internet (or at least autobiographic blogging, vlogging, and podcasting). In other words, there comes a time in the evolution of any medium where the audience is forced to confront the fact that the medium can be used for mass deception. They are forced to become critical of it. Again, this only applies to aspects of the Internet (primarily those that ape aspects of "traditional media" like YouTube does to TV. But the same can be said about autobiographic blogs.
loneleygirl15 is real in the sense that the person who is on screen is almost certainly real, and she is real in the sense that the sentiments that she expresses, the motives that inform those sentiments, are both from another real person (or perhaps several real people) - the Creators. It is possible that The Creators is just a computer program that analyzes autobiographic blogs, pulls recurring themes, sentiments, and motives and weaves those into a story (unlikely considering how unsophisticated AI is rright now, but in principle, such a program, with minor human assistance, could exist soon).
Is lonelygirl15 any less real than the coached personalities on Laguna Beach? What if those personalities weren't coached? Would that, then, be real? By "real," I suppose we mean that the actions of a person are motivated by only them, and not other forces, or that at least those other forces pass through the filter of that person. It would be better if Bree was "real" in the sense that she, like the characters on Laguna Beach and the Hills, had a pre-existing life that was dicovered by producers and then shaped to suit dramatic needs. There could never be any definitive unmasking. There would never really be any lying. It would be impossible to fix the line between reality and fiction. They (or she) might have been coached, and her behavior might have been altered, but it is impossible to say to what degree and in what way.
We all put on some sort of a performance to garner attention, in our writings and our behavior. What makes us real?
So this is all some combination of Andy Kaufman and Andy Warhol. And at least for now, it feels new.
Monday, April 10, 2006
My Death Space cont
So I guess they do have murderers and suicides on this site. The random deaths (e.g., car crash) are interesting at first, sort of poignant. But this is different.
I can't imagine that this will last. Do family members of the victims/suicides have any recourse? Can they tell myspace.com to take the site down, or do they just not want to do that? I feel like a huge chunk of the private world just became public. This happened long ago to sex, in some incomplete way. Ultimately, the motives of murderers and suicides (along with sex) were always accessible, but it was difficult to get to that information, so the Internet just makes it considerably easier, and that makes more people give in to that curiousity and that makes it more acceptable.
So I guess I'm filtering through these murderers and suicides, playing amatuer psychologist, but feeling somehow guilty about it. Is it rubbernecking?
I can't imagine that this will last. Do family members of the victims/suicides have any recourse? Can they tell myspace.com to take the site down, or do they just not want to do that? I feel like a huge chunk of the private world just became public. This happened long ago to sex, in some incomplete way. Ultimately, the motives of murderers and suicides (along with sex) were always accessible, but it was difficult to get to that information, so the Internet just makes it considerably easier, and that makes more people give in to that curiousity and that makes it more acceptable.
So I guess I'm filtering through these murderers and suicides, playing amatuer psychologist, but feeling somehow guilty about it. Is it rubbernecking?
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
blogging and death
http://www.myspace.com/aznsilkyboxers69
www.mydeathspace.com
I'd thought a bit about journals or blogs or social networking profiles like MySpace as something that would live on after you die, but in sort of an abstract way, but now, thru mydeathspace, I've found entries from people who have died.
In a way, a blog becomes more important after you die. While you're alive, you can modify people's judgment of who you are by replying to comments or by meeting them in person. But once you die, all of that blog (or journal or myspace page) is you. You can't supplement it or contradict it.
The people who really loved you probably don't care that much about your blog. Perthaps it would just be casual acquaintances who would go to your myspace page after your death, or strangers. The whole point of blogging and myspace seems to be social networking, and so they become pointless in death, or become repurposed.
There are blogs by people who committed suicide, probably blogs by those who commit murder. If (god forbid) someone committed many murders (a la Columbine), I can only assume the police would take down that person's blog. Would that be the "right" thing to do, and if not, is that out of respect for the people that died? If that's the case, then why leave up the blog of a suicide, or someone who died in some other way?
Its very easy to say, "of course a murderer's blog should be taken down out of respect for the victims. Don't be sick!" But does the murderer gain anything by having the blog up there? Do we, the public, lose anything by not having it up there? I remember when blogs first started out, thinking that this would be the ultimate tool for learning about a large number of people, how they felt, how they thought. Soon afterwards, I discovered how banal so many people (including myself) were. If blogs are a way of learning about human nature and behavior, doesn't it make sense to keep the liminal people's blogs intact and public? Would you prefer they just be viewed by the police?
If you're going to be offended by the presense of a blog, I would think it would be these blogs that stay up after people die, rather than the ones that stay up after a person commits murder.
Being overly ironic in one's blog or myspace page seems like a bad move if only for this reason. It can all be a joke while you're alive, but if you die, it can become the only facet of you that lives on in the public sphere. Then again, you're dead, so what do you care, right?
Even weirder, I read a blog entry by a guy whose daughter had been killed that day (there's no way to prove the veracity of this, but it seems believable). I read a blog by someone who had been hospitalized and died days later. Its one thing to blog when you've gotta blow off steam, or blog to be noticed, or blog to stay in touch with people. But to blog right after your only daughter has been murdered? What is driving that person to do that? I can only guess that he feels some sort of very real connection to his readership. But his readership is...almost illusory. It could be everyone and it could be no one. It could be curiousity seekers or people who actually care. There's something significant about the internet playing a role in these emotions, these moments in people's lives. I guess the internet has been a part of sex and love for years now, so why not death? Its one thing to use the internet for casual conversation or business. But these core emotions and events...
It sounds as though I'm totally opposed to it, which I'm not. In fact, I kinda enjoy this sensation of things evolving so quickly, faster than our ability to theorize about them, to even begin to figure them out. The way we define friend or loved one seems to be changing, maybe even the way we define love or death.
www.mydeathspace.com
I'd thought a bit about journals or blogs or social networking profiles like MySpace as something that would live on after you die, but in sort of an abstract way, but now, thru mydeathspace, I've found entries from people who have died.
In a way, a blog becomes more important after you die. While you're alive, you can modify people's judgment of who you are by replying to comments or by meeting them in person. But once you die, all of that blog (or journal or myspace page) is you. You can't supplement it or contradict it.
The people who really loved you probably don't care that much about your blog. Perthaps it would just be casual acquaintances who would go to your myspace page after your death, or strangers. The whole point of blogging and myspace seems to be social networking, and so they become pointless in death, or become repurposed.
There are blogs by people who committed suicide, probably blogs by those who commit murder. If (god forbid) someone committed many murders (a la Columbine), I can only assume the police would take down that person's blog. Would that be the "right" thing to do, and if not, is that out of respect for the people that died? If that's the case, then why leave up the blog of a suicide, or someone who died in some other way?
Its very easy to say, "of course a murderer's blog should be taken down out of respect for the victims. Don't be sick!" But does the murderer gain anything by having the blog up there? Do we, the public, lose anything by not having it up there? I remember when blogs first started out, thinking that this would be the ultimate tool for learning about a large number of people, how they felt, how they thought. Soon afterwards, I discovered how banal so many people (including myself) were. If blogs are a way of learning about human nature and behavior, doesn't it make sense to keep the liminal people's blogs intact and public? Would you prefer they just be viewed by the police?
If you're going to be offended by the presense of a blog, I would think it would be these blogs that stay up after people die, rather than the ones that stay up after a person commits murder.
Being overly ironic in one's blog or myspace page seems like a bad move if only for this reason. It can all be a joke while you're alive, but if you die, it can become the only facet of you that lives on in the public sphere. Then again, you're dead, so what do you care, right?
Even weirder, I read a blog entry by a guy whose daughter had been killed that day (there's no way to prove the veracity of this, but it seems believable). I read a blog by someone who had been hospitalized and died days later. Its one thing to blog when you've gotta blow off steam, or blog to be noticed, or blog to stay in touch with people. But to blog right after your only daughter has been murdered? What is driving that person to do that? I can only guess that he feels some sort of very real connection to his readership. But his readership is...almost illusory. It could be everyone and it could be no one. It could be curiousity seekers or people who actually care. There's something significant about the internet playing a role in these emotions, these moments in people's lives. I guess the internet has been a part of sex and love for years now, so why not death? Its one thing to use the internet for casual conversation or business. But these core emotions and events...
It sounds as though I'm totally opposed to it, which I'm not. In fact, I kinda enjoy this sensation of things evolving so quickly, faster than our ability to theorize about them, to even begin to figure them out. The way we define friend or loved one seems to be changing, maybe even the way we define love or death.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
bloggies (or movlogs)
OK, so, here's my idea.
PHASE 1: Using existing rudimentary Flash animation and language translation technology, I create a program that can "translate" text into stick-figure animated short films. Most sentences that people write use a limited assortment of combinations of subjects and verbs, settings and people. Much the same way you copy a paragraph of text in English and paste it into babelfish, so too would you paste a block of text into the text-to-movie translator. Of course, the text would have to be a narrative of sorts, e.g. I got outta bed this morning, blew my nose, and blood came out.
PHASE 2: I get the program to randomly access publicly available blogs and recognize narratives within these blogs (as opposed to rants, raves, etc). The program translates people's blogs into bloovies, bloggies, movlogs or perhaps blilms.
PHASE 3: After working up this prototype, I get some funding and make the graphics and translation a bit better. No more stick figures. Something more along the lines of Grand Theft Auto.
PHASE 4: As an add on, I install "filters" that allow the user to render a block of text in a certain cinematic style. For instance, if you wanted to see "What I Did Last Saturday Night" as directed by Gaspar Noe, or Speilberg, or Scorsese, or whomever, you could. You could see "What I Did Last Saturday Night" as an art film, or as a Martin Lawrence vehicle.
PHASE 5: Rather than tell people what you did last night, you can show them by sending them a link. Or perhaps we'll all have Video Ipods, only w/ bigger retractable screens, so when I'm all, "whaddyou do last Saturday night," you'll be all, "well, let's take a look." And you'll whip out your VIPod, show me what's what, and we'll all have a laugh.
possible objections:
#1 Realism - The human faces and voices have been the biggest stumbling block (see The Polar Express and voice simulation software ). It seems no matter how crisp the detail in CGI images of faces are, we can still detect the differences, and they still seem ultra creepy. So, at first, we're going to have to make due w/ "What I Did Last Saturday Night," the animated series. But maybe that's more fun than the real thing anyway. As far as voice goes, you can do your own voice over of events, and do imitations of your friends for the dialogue.
#2 "We're losing the human touch, this is the death of storytelling, what will we talk to each other about, wa wa wa!" Yes, yes, we've all heard this objection before. When we tell stories, we're more in dictation mode than interaction mode. Nothing wrong w/ using motion pictures to communicate more than we do now. Humans will always have to create content for motion pictures, and those pictures will only have meaning if they relate to our social lives. If you don't like it, then stop watching TV, films, etc.
#3 "Who wants to read someone's shitty life (see My Bloody Nose above), let alone watch it and listen to it?" Good point. But I'd watch shit on TV that I wouldn't have the patience to read. Maybe I'm lazy like that, but I think I'm in good company. Moving pictures are fun. Someone recently made the point to me that 'Reality TV' fulfills a different desire than fictional TV - the desire to survey. It doesn't have to be "good" b/c its real. We'll always want to know more about our fellow humans. I, for one, would rather watch your Saturday night as directed by David Lynch than read about it. Or at least I'd like the option of that.
At the very least, something in this vein would be of use to funders or executive producers (for turning screenplays into rudimentary versions of the finished product, sort of a halfway step between storyboarding and the final cut). If you're poring millions into a big-budget action film, then you'll want as good of an idea of how things are going to go as you can get. Sure, there will always be un-simulatable x-factors like actor performances, but the less unknowns there are, the happier producers will be. I'd imagine CGI films already work something like this.
PHASE 1: Using existing rudimentary Flash animation and language translation technology, I create a program that can "translate" text into stick-figure animated short films. Most sentences that people write use a limited assortment of combinations of subjects and verbs, settings and people. Much the same way you copy a paragraph of text in English and paste it into babelfish, so too would you paste a block of text into the text-to-movie translator. Of course, the text would have to be a narrative of sorts, e.g. I got outta bed this morning, blew my nose, and blood came out.
PHASE 2: I get the program to randomly access publicly available blogs and recognize narratives within these blogs (as opposed to rants, raves, etc). The program translates people's blogs into bloovies, bloggies, movlogs or perhaps blilms.
PHASE 3: After working up this prototype, I get some funding and make the graphics and translation a bit better. No more stick figures. Something more along the lines of Grand Theft Auto.
PHASE 4: As an add on, I install "filters" that allow the user to render a block of text in a certain cinematic style. For instance, if you wanted to see "What I Did Last Saturday Night" as directed by Gaspar Noe, or Speilberg, or Scorsese, or whomever, you could. You could see "What I Did Last Saturday Night" as an art film, or as a Martin Lawrence vehicle.
PHASE 5: Rather than tell people what you did last night, you can show them by sending them a link. Or perhaps we'll all have Video Ipods, only w/ bigger retractable screens, so when I'm all, "whaddyou do last Saturday night," you'll be all, "well, let's take a look." And you'll whip out your VIPod, show me what's what, and we'll all have a laugh.
possible objections:
#1 Realism - The human faces and voices have been the biggest stumbling block (see The Polar Express and voice simulation software ). It seems no matter how crisp the detail in CGI images of faces are, we can still detect the differences, and they still seem ultra creepy. So, at first, we're going to have to make due w/ "What I Did Last Saturday Night," the animated series. But maybe that's more fun than the real thing anyway. As far as voice goes, you can do your own voice over of events, and do imitations of your friends for the dialogue.
#2 "We're losing the human touch, this is the death of storytelling, what will we talk to each other about, wa wa wa!" Yes, yes, we've all heard this objection before. When we tell stories, we're more in dictation mode than interaction mode. Nothing wrong w/ using motion pictures to communicate more than we do now. Humans will always have to create content for motion pictures, and those pictures will only have meaning if they relate to our social lives. If you don't like it, then stop watching TV, films, etc.
#3 "Who wants to read someone's shitty life (see My Bloody Nose above), let alone watch it and listen to it?" Good point. But I'd watch shit on TV that I wouldn't have the patience to read. Maybe I'm lazy like that, but I think I'm in good company. Moving pictures are fun. Someone recently made the point to me that 'Reality TV' fulfills a different desire than fictional TV - the desire to survey. It doesn't have to be "good" b/c its real. We'll always want to know more about our fellow humans. I, for one, would rather watch your Saturday night as directed by David Lynch than read about it. Or at least I'd like the option of that.
At the very least, something in this vein would be of use to funders or executive producers (for turning screenplays into rudimentary versions of the finished product, sort of a halfway step between storyboarding and the final cut). If you're poring millions into a big-budget action film, then you'll want as good of an idea of how things are going to go as you can get. Sure, there will always be un-simulatable x-factors like actor performances, but the less unknowns there are, the happier producers will be. I'd imagine CGI films already work something like this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)