Montage

The short film SuperAnx which I showed as a montage/composite assignment, can now be viewed with English subtitles. Follow the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7OKCLmGrew

Of narrative and animation

While I was surfing around on YouTube (I do it occasionally), I ran into animations of The Brothers McLeod. Besides Fuggy Fuggy, which is just funny to watch, I would like to highlight a short animation called Spamland#1.

You'll probably watch it once, watch it twice and on the fifth turn you'd still be thinking 'what the hell?'. Nevertheless, Spamland has got more than 500,000 views since October 2006 and has been featured on YouTube's front page several times. Trying to solve this phaenomenon, I found this post, which tries to transcribe the narrative of the story. Well, the narrative goes nowhere but there still is a sense of narrative. The Brothers McLeod have clearly taken data used to camouflage the spam and used it for a narrative source material. That leaves us the question - can you make a narrative out of everything and make it look appealing? I suppose.

There is also a nice interview with The Brothers McLeod at Cold Hard Flash.

Blognotes on 7/03

Composite - putting together media objects from different sources

What's the difference between compositing and montage?
- Compositing seeks to reality whereas montage takes the freedom of creating imaginary world.

But what's similar?
- Pastiche (dramatic, literary, or musical piece openly imitating the previous works of other artists, often with satirical intent), quotation, e.g. montage looks funny but it points to some real event. (?)

Assingment
...was to put together a composite or montage. We decided to go for the good-old SuperAnx.

Blognotes on 28/02

Narrating is a synonym for story telling. Story telling is the oldest media. Narrative has a free ordering of elements.

Cinema and novel follow the same pattern - there's one narrative chosen. In films is tradition of making different versions for the film for distribution (director's cut, etc.).

A fabula is the chronological reconstruction of all the events of a nonchronological plot in a film (In contrast to syuzhet). ex: Pulp Fiction, Citizen Kane. (It always have to be linear.)

There is no neutral storytelling. There are value choices (taking sides).

Montage is in every story - every video, text, etc.

Data - A pile of papers on desk can not be database, as it's not indexed.

Narrative can be viewed as a 1D (one-dimensional) projection.

New mobile... thing

As my assignment to the lecture about tele (which I had to skip because I was in Helsinki for a week) I read an article "Mobile VoIP could radically change cellphone use". As I'm bit into mobile phones myself, I find it quite interesting how this field will develop in near future.

So far, mobile phones, although they have derived quite many tasks of today's computers (surfing the web, reading mail, games, office software, etc.) and even have some new features also not common to first mobile phones concepts (camera, video calls), there's still one difference between mobile phones and computers - they use different networks. Both networks for mobile phones (NMT => GSM => 3G) and computers (dial-up? => LAN => wireless) are developing, becoming faster, wider. Now it's time for mobile phones to grab a bite of fast and relatevely cheaper wireless networking. New mobile phones (Nokia N80, N95) already have a WiFi compatibility.

Of course, with access to the Internet via the "computer-way" you'll start thinking - hey, why I must pay for my calls if I can have them free over the Internet? Here's were VOIP and Skype step into mobile business. This technology will but mobile networking in a danger, as they can not suck so much money out of a customer, so it's announced that VOIP on mobile phone will still cost some. We'll see.

I'm curious about how will mobile devices look when all features of mobilephones and computers are mixed into one device. Currently mobile phones still have too small screen to be fully used instead of laptops, as well as you can't use your laptop as a mobile phone.

Comments are welcome! :)

Hey all!

This will be a blog about my studies. I study at Tallinn University and I'm majoring IT Management. The blog was started during an IMKE (Interactive Media and Knowledge Environments) course of history and visions of media. Later I might start collecting thoughts about my thesis here or something like that.

Enjoy!