finally, the finished product.

I ended up making 3 TED talks because as I was sitting in the library trying to do this, I realized that I had so many different ideas of ways I wanted this to end up that I became severely overwhelmed. For the final product, what I ended up doing was looking through the albums that I have in my iTunes and finding artists that (in my eyes) have a pattern they've followed for the concept of their album covers. I used John Mayer, The Fray, Spice Girls, *NSYNC, and Lady GaGa. Hopefully this makes sense!

TED talk description

Lauren Nitting breaks down album art through the eyes of the avid listener. She will look at patterns in album covers and go into how certain albums convey certain messages. Nitting does her best to give completely unbiased opinions of certain artists while providing quotes concerning what the artists might have been going for with their album covers. Finally, Nitting will close with examples of a few of her favorite covers, giving insight into what kind of emotions they can evoke within the listener.

REVISION TO MY TED TALK.

I've been trying to figure out how playing specific clips of music videos would work without having to stand in front of everyone and go through youtube multiple times. Since I can't think of any way that would work, I decided to modify my TED talk and instead of music videos, I'm going to use album covers instead. I plan on showing the evolution of album covers from maybe the 90s up until now, kind of like a path of the music I've been listening to since I was younger. And/or I'm going to go kind of follow a few artists and show how they've evolved with their album covers as they continue to release new studio albums. Sooo yeah! That's the new plan!

TED talk idea.

Technology and Images
Entertainment and Images
Design and images

Wellllll the entertainment aspect of TED talks is what jumps out at me the most. More specifically the music part of the entertainment industry. Sooo, if all goes as planned and I can sort through the hundreds of thousands of them, I'm going to do my TED talk on seeing through mediums in music videos. I have a few in mind that would be great examples, but I want to think of some more. The one that immediately comes to mind is "Bigger Than My Body" by John Mayer. And I guess you'll just have to wait until the talk to find out why!

Good idea? Bad idea? Somewhere in between?

Second Life -- "a virtual environment."

Second Life, a potential escape from the first one. Kind of? Over the past week in class, we've gotten to experiment with this new environment. I had heard of Second Life already because of my love of the TV show "The Office", as Dwight creates his own avatar. Philip Rosedale, or rather Philip Linden, created Second Life a few years ago as a means to create a virtual world for others to use. You can literally be whoever you want to be. Plus the options for names are somewhat hysterical. For example, my avatar is named Hilary Adored. She looks kinda like me I guess. Brown hair, brown eyes. But I made her thinner. A girl can dream. And she's wearing pink, and I hate wearing pink. But I ultimately gave up on "personalizing" her because it was frustrating. You can make them look however you like, jump, fly, and even go to St. Joe's.

Residents, as we're called in this virtual environment, can interact with each other by means of conversation or, as my friend as I figured out, running into people. From my experience, these conversations are similar to someone IMing you. This is part of the whole experience that I didn't like so much. You have no idea who these people are, which can be good or bad considering it's not really REAL life. You can purchase land and essentially recreate yourself through this world that can be as similar or different to yours as you want.

So, this brings me to my main question: why create an avatar? Why become a Second Life "resident"? I feel like people could be wanting a brief escape, or possibly just for fun. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it just didn't do it for me. The concept of a virtual world is becoming more common as our society becomes increasingly more dependent on technology. I think it's safe to say that at this rate, what with online shopping, online classes, and now Second Life and other technological resources, eventually people won't have to leave the house!

However...I think Dwight sums it up better than I do:

"I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great I literally wanted to create a second one. Absolutely everything was the same...except I could fly."
"Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn't have winners or losers."

Digital Breakdown

Digital Imagery!
I used pixinate and picnik to make these images look digital and slightly resemble the visual representation from UTEOTW.
The first one is a picture I took while down the shore in Ocean City, NJ. I vacation there every summer.
The second one is another picture I took at Isgro Bakery in the Italian market (near South Street). For this one, the option on pixinate was called oil painting so that's hopefully what you all think it resembles!
The third is a picture of me and my 2 younger brothers. For this one, I took away a lot of the vibrancy of the colors and added lines that were supposed to make the picture look like it was on a TV, but I don't think that worked out very well.
The fourth picture is of me and my roommate and I pixilated this one so that you can hardly decipher who we are.
The fifth and final picture is another one I took down the shore while playing mini golf. I was overlooking Castaway Cove, the part of the boardwalk with the rides and, of course, the ferris wheel. I used a neon function on picnik for this one.

UTEOTW -- a visual dream?

I'll be honest, I was skeptical at first when I heard we were watching this movie in class. And then once we started, I was completely confused for the first few scenes. For a movie that was filmed in the 90s, it was one of the more futuristic works I'd seen in some time. After some time, the visual characteristics of the movie became more blatant and exposed. I feel like saying some of the images in this movie were very digitally enhanced might be an understatement. The scenes where Sam and Clare were with Sam's parents testing the machine that would allow his mother to see whatever he was thinking were especially concentrated with an array of different images. All of them were digitized to the point where I was straining my eyes to decipher what was on the screen. Personally, this type of visual representation wasn't at all aesthetically pleasing to me. Maybe it's because the images in movies I watch are in no way distorted or become cause for any serious looking into, but regardless I wasn't as drawn to the images as others might have been. I'm assuming the director as trying to get a point across by doing that, I'm just not sure I want to understand it.

The one thing that really bothered me, and it came up in class discussion on multiple occasions, was (that's right, you guessed it) THE SOUNDTRACK. I really can't come up with words to describe how bothered I was. For me, a movie soundtrack is supposed to make you remember the feelings that were invoked in you while you were watching it. Like when I hear "Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds, I automatically think of "The Breakfast Club". Or when anyone hears the orchestra pieces from Harry Potter, you obviously think of Harry Potter. I relate music to how I felt during a movie or how the characters were feeling. If a slower song is playing, then it's a more melancholy scene. And oppositely, if it's a fast-paced song, then something that I should probably pay attention to is happening. This movie did NONE of that for me. I really think the downfall was picking the songs before the movie was produced. That's essentially doing it backwards because then you have these songs that you're desperately trying to make work instead of letting it all fall into place; it should be effortless. UGH I'm getting so frustrated thinking about it. It just didn't fit at all. I think at times (or through most of the movie) I was noticing the music rather than the images. But hey, that's just me.

All in all, UTEOTW wasn't awful, but it wasn't up there with the greatest either. However, I will give it to the director, the imagery was at times very interesting and like a breath of fresh air (especially with the road movies). Other than that, I can't believe there's a 9 hour version. UNREAL.

GUI project.

Okay well I officially wasn't meant to own a computer. I didn't get to present this in class because my computer was being fixed and then today when I was getting ready to come to class, my computer turned off and wouldn't turn back on. Apparently my hard drive is going to crash very soon. Sooooo sorry for the delay with this! But for my GUI, I went with the first choice, illustrating what I do on a daily basis. I used picnik (yes, I picniked) to add the words to the pictures. Oh and since learning to use iMovie for the last project, I felt like using it again because I've become a pro. And the John Mayer song is a classic and one of my favorites. Hope you enjoy!

infosethics.

Sincere apologies for how late this post is!

Infosethics...I didn't really understand what they were before I had to explore them and I'm still a little confused. However, I still have more clarity after looking at this really cool site. The premise of this is to not resist temptation to click anything on the site. You're supposed to simply scroll over everything and read what it says without clicking. The only click you're allowed is the initial one to enter the site. I failed the first 2 times looking at it; it's an impulse to click! I showed my roommates too and they just gave up and weren't all that into it to say the least.

Basically, the idea for DON'TCLICK.IT came from the idea that there's all this "dead space" when you're simply moving your mouse around looking for what you want to click on. So the creator just took away the click. He poses a good question: Does removing the click change our behavior of navigation? I know for me, clicking around websites is an easy impulse and it's hard to not give in. So that makes this a huge challenge.

When you click, a screen shows up and asks if the click was an accident or intentional and the screen looks like static. All in all, it was well worth the time I spent NOT clicking around.

Prezi - Kress Chapter 3

Sooo we learned how to use Prezi yesterday and today in class. My Prezi is all about the key terms from Chapter 3 in Kress (pages 87-94). Definitely confusing at first, but all in all, I think it's a really cool way to convey information. This is worlds better than powerpoint.

link to my prezi!

first post - reaction to movies.

So the first movie was a 14 minute piece titled "Meshes of the Afternoon". One of the main themes I noticed throughout the film was the recurrence of the knife. I wasn't sure if that was supposed to reference an underlying theme of violence, but in the end the woman ends up dead (or at least it looked that way to me). Also, the movie comments Deren makes on this movie were more concrete and specific. Comparing the two, I didn't like the periodic noise that occured in "Meshes of the Afternoon", although it added a sense of suspense and kept me somewhat on the edge of my seat. Also, the individual she follows whose face we never seem to catch a glimpse of intrigued me throughout the entire movie.

The second movie (of course the title escapes me) appealed to me more. I LOVED how it looked like she was climbing from up driftwood, but then it seemed as those she was climbing onto a table during a dinner party. In the movie comments, Deren touches on how she wanted it to look as though she was swimming, like in the "sea" of leaves she is in at one point. I think she was completely successful in this. Although she is in three different environments in the beginning, I think they all flow together perfectly. The one thing that I was trying to do was read the lips of the characters as they were talking to each other. I failed in doing so, but I would've liked to know what the dialogue was. In general the cinematography is exceptional and altogether intriguing. I feel like it's all open to interpretation, but I think her point of view is clearly conveyed.

So there's the first post! Say what you need to say.