Video Games Converted to Movies
In class last week, we discussed how the first person shooter was a camera angle that was first adopted for movies in cinema. Especially used by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock. Or a way to create a sense of isolation for the main character, or to utilize it as a way to view the events such as through binoculers or night vision. We also discussed how movies are being adopted into different storylines to be played as a game, such as Golden Eye 007, Harry Potter movies, or now even the movies such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones in Lego form.
However, more and more original video games are being turned into movies. Not always with the most popular success because of such a cult following and because they land up as poorly acted, bad writing, and low budget films. Some have achieved some modest success such as the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movies. (although that might be partly because they recruited Angelina Jolie to be Lara Croft).
Ironically it wasn’t till several days later that I remembered watching the movie Doom based on the video games. (It was a terrible movie and I saw it with my ex, both very good reasons to attempt to block the horrible experience from my memory). But something that was interesting about the movie is one whole scene is shot like the main character is the first person shooter, even in the same way it reloads the gun. Of course, it comes off a lot more corny and ridiculous than it was done in the video games. But it was interesting how the movie attempted the scene. And honestly (or sadly?) it was the best part of the movie. Is FPS able to be translated to film in the same way it is represented in video games? Does it work? If so, why or why not?
Heroes
I figure since I mention the TV show Heroes so much as an example of fan culture, that I might as well discuss it in a blog.
Heroes is the lastest “cult” TV show equal to Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, and CSI. I refer to the term “cult” loosely since I realize that it is not what we defined as a “cult movie” since it still exists in the realm of popular fiction. However, the show does compromise of a huge following, their own language when referring to the show, and the catchphrase that every comedy show made fun of for months after the release “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World”.
The interesting thing they have done with Heroes is make stories outside of the main TV show plotline. For example, NBC has on their website graphic novels that come out once a week on Monday nights, when the episodes air. They even have the graphic novels when the season is over during the summer to keep the audience engaged with the series, creating extraneous characters and histories within the context of the same show. They also have Heroes Evolutions which is more outside stories about the companies, characters, and plotlines involved in the show which can also send texts to your phones of other mysteries to solve involving Sylar and the Primatech Paper Company. This keeps the fan culture alive in other ways than simply through fan fiction, but authorized by the writers and creators of Heroes and its affiliates. With so many avenues of other stories, there is no need for fan fiction to even exist. The TV show itself generates enough storylines for you.
Sidereel- Transmedia?
While I was in England studying abroad, I had to find a source to watch my favorite TV shows. There’s no way I can afford to buy the seasons after they come out so I had to find a way to have unlimited access to my favorite shows, as the TV junkie that I admittedly am. (although with the amount of time I have lately, I’m lucky to even be able to turn the TV on for two minutes before I have to go to class, read a novel, write a paper, go to work, and then pass out with exhaustion).
My website of choice is Sidereel.com
I think that television shows is a media which can be converted into lots of different venues, especially through the world wide web. Since TV watching is usually an individual event strictly at home and not like a collective experience such as watching a movie on the big screen, people have to find ways to connect with one another about their favorite TV shows. I believe a lot of the fans are able to do that through the internet more than any other venue (such as newsprint media, novels, fan fiction, and likewise).
I started to wonder though if having the episodes online changed the original television media into a new form of media: internet TV. By taking the individual episodes and posting them online freezes the television idea of flow by taking out a component of it for later viewing. You could also argue that TiVo and DVR have the same function. The one factor that I love about watching online is that I know I can miss the show with no guilt and be able to catch up later when I have the time.
Are these television shows online a form of trans media? And if they are trans media, than is the television shows themselves no longer isolated to television as their only form? Or because they are originally television shows, they can only be connected to that medium? Is it the same media only expressed in a different medium?
Freerice.com- A Global Consciousness in a Virtual World
I like to think about the idea of a global consciousness. Since studying abroad in Oxford, my idea of what a global consciousness entails is a little more enlightened than for those who haven’t traveled at all. When on one hand, it’s possible to have an idea of our world because with the concept of airline travel, our world has shrunk significantly since from the great mass that it once was. On the other hand, there are a vast number of differences between the various cultures, languages, and living styles of other areas of the globe that may seem weird or “foreign” to outsiders.
The idea of a global consciousness for me does not include just “One World” but how we are aware of news, events, and happenings around the world instantly at our finger tips through the internet and world news. We also try to make an effort to help those who are less fortunate than us around the world. (so we try to feed the starving children in Africa and ignore the thousands of homeless roaming our own streets). An attempt to help feed the hungry is the website freerice.com.
In the virtual world, we can make a difference in the physical while hungry people are dying and we are sitting in the comforts of our home, taking a guess at the meaning of words to feed them. How is the virtual world able to affect the physical world of suffering in the aspects of time, distance, and monetary means? Although the game is fun and slowly addicting, it seems to belittle the serious issue of hunger into a game for those who don’t suffer it. Also it helps make people think they are creating a difference by doing something that doesn’t sacrafice anything for them but time.
Another example is the facebook application called Lil Green Forest Patch, that claims for every 10 virtual plants you send to your friend, they will save a square foot of rainforest. (for the record, can I just say that a square foot is really not very big. And I think there is only a square foot of rainforest left in the world anyway). How is sending virtual plants and little kids dressed up in odd vegetable and fruit costumes supposed to help save rainforests?
(you have to tend your garden so you have to pull weeds, water, rake leaves, and get rid of annoying pests that cause damage to your garden).
I send out the plants for the sake of sending them out but I’m not sure how doing so saves anything. We have a global construct of making change happen and being aware of what is going on in our world. But are we really changing anything if we only attempt to be active virtually?
Money Spending
I’m sorry to say that most of my examples of culture in media and technology come from working at Best Buy, where practically everything in the store is some kind of media (CD’s, films) or a channel for media (computers, TVs). (Also the reason that my examples come from Best Buy is that I have no life outside of school and work, so consequently my view of media is very limited). And I happen to see EVERYTHING that gets sold during the day because I ring up the purchases.
Last week (or was it the week before?) the latest Adam Sandler movie You Don’t Mess with the Zohan came out.
He is so not doing the splits in that photo...
And I decided to do a little experiment. Every time someone bought it I asked the customer the same question “Have you seen this movie yet?” and everyone answered the same answer “No” Then they go on to explain that they had heard it was good and decided to buy it.
I found this to be a cultural phenomenon. We depend on people’s opinions to tell us if a movie is good enough to deem if it is worth spending money on. And instead of seeing it in theaters for 8 or 9 dollars they decide to buy the movie, probably see it only once, and spend $16. Part of the reason I find this odd is because I would never spend that much money to buy a movie I have never seen, in the chance that I don’t care for it and find it a waste of money. (It doesn’t help on the fact that I am a poor college student and have no extra flow of cash to spend any money on except food, my rent, and my bills).
I believe one can learn a lot about a person on what they spend their money on, especially when it comes to media. If the person buys the latest TV model, the latest laptop, the coolest ipod, the Blu Ray DVD, or the latest album, explains how one views or listens to their media and how one selects what to view, read, watch, listen, and/or sing along to.
Just interesting food for thought.
School is Ruining My Brain
Last week, during my break at work, some guys in the break room were watching CNN about the Presidential Debates. The debates were just ending when I walked in and a group of newscasters and political commentators all sat around with laptops going over the speeches given my McCain and Obama. As I looked at all the people sitting there, a good 10-15 people, I realized that all of them were white.
On top of Comm 125, which makes me analyze everything about what I see depicted in media, I also am taking African American Literature and Feminist Literary Theory where I discuss racism and sexism everyday of the week.
So when I saw that not one minority was represented as someone who was giving their opinion about the debates, I felt that CNN, all of the newscasters, and the political commentators present lost all crediability to me. Although the whole population may not be aware of it, the campaign that is currently happening is fighting a lot of racist and sexist thought that exists in society. In certain ways, people are overcoming and in other ways, people are not.
The point being, the fact that CNN blatantly did not have a minority political commentator be present in responding to the debates of the presidential candidates, I felt was a bad call. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, race is a big factor in this election and CNN needs to represent that in who they have as commentators, newscasters, and critics.
School is ruining my brain. I can no longer look at anything objectively anymore. Damn.
Perspective
First, I started with a fish.
I took the picture, including my feet like I was on the edge of water looking over it. Also my blue toenail matched the mosaic stones. Then I started thinking about perspective. And not just my perspective, but the perspective of the fish. I laid my camera down right over the eye and took the next shot.
I actually thought that the fish had a good perspective if he witnessed this every morning. Then with every statue I came across I would take a picture of where they were looking. For example:
Statue
Her perspective:
Your perspective impacts how you view the world and I think the fish and women have a lot better perspective than some of us do in our world.
Men are Pigs
If you can’t tell, the princess is swooning over Mr. Dreamy over there, but he ignores her for the bikini clad babe. Such is life.
Musical Show Numbers
As long as I can remember, I’ve always loved to be on a stage.
When I was young, my front porch was my stage. I would play games of pretend and perform for an audience of butterflies, bees, and the grass. My alternate stage would be the living room, in front of the TV, with the musical blasting. As I was naturally a dramatic person, my mother put me in children’s theater. I was in a very odd version of “Alice in Wonderland” where I had my face painted green and sang Turtle Soup when I was 8. When I was 10, I was in another odd version of “The Wizard of Oz” where I was part of the ensemble cast: a tree, a munchkin, a ghost, and a soldier. Opening weekend I had the worst stomach flu of my entire life, and I avoided the theater again until high school.
(Here I am in high school my senior year, as a promiscuous cat named Queenie for the production of Honk!)
(This was Urinetown at St. Mary’s Spring 2007. I’m on the right in the back. I was Mst. McQueen).
However, my true love for musicals happened when I went to see Phantom of the Opera in San Francisco. I had never been to a show in the big city and I was in awe. I fell in love.
(Personally, if I was Christine I would have stuck with Phantom. I always thought Raoul was such a wimp).
After Phantom, I became focused on musicals. People often thing of show numbers as cheesy in music and style. But where others found a corny quality, I found magic. I wanted my life to be a musical. I wanted to be able to sing my feelings out whenever I wanted to, without people looking at me oddly with the lyrics coming out just right. It would be my soundtrack for life. Since I couldn’t do that in real life, I turned to the musicals that could.
What I also like about musical show numbers is how they are all different. Certain composers have a similar style such as Andrew Lloyd Weber or Cole Porter. After awhile, you learn to identify which composers wrote which musicals. For example, Tim Rice and Elton John writing Aida. There’s moments where I can hear a beat, sound, or lyric that sounds so much like an Elton John song. I don’t know if that means all pop music sounds the same, because I don’t feel that is the case with all musicals. They all have their own unique sound.
Inspiration from musicals come from culture and a variety of sources as well. Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera is based on a French novel written by Gaston Leroux in the early 1900’s. It has been adapted for several different movie renditions, successfully or not. Now it is most popular as the musical which is Broadway’s longest running musical to date.
Another example would be the musical Wicked (coming to San Francisco very soon). Originally, Wicked was a book written by Gregory Maguire which told the life of the Wicked Witch of the West, a popular figure we all recognize from the books and movie The Wizard of Oz. The book then turned into the popular musical.
(My favorite song).
My favorite musical currently would have to be The Last Five Years, written by Jason Robert Brown who writes about a relationship between a man and a woman. Only the woman starts at the end of the relationship and the man starts at the beginning, and the two meet in the middle as you see how they fall in love, and how they fall out of it. It was because of that musical that I was inspired to seek other pieces done by Jason Robert Brown and sound his musical Songs From a New World. I didn’t like the musical as a whole as much asThe Last 5 Years, but I loved the one song “Stars and the Moon”. For some reason, he writes ballads of suffering women very well. In Last 5 Years, he writes the song “Still Hurting” where the main character Cathy is struggling with her husband leaving her. “Stars and the Moon” has the same amount of humor and hurt to it that I find classic in Jason Robert Brown’s work.
For my voice final, I sang two songs. The first was an English song written in the 1600’s called “Breake Now my Heart and Dye” in which I totally butchered it, because I didn’t memorize the second verse well enough. The second song is “Stars and the Moon”.
Summertime Blues
Cliches do exist for a reason. Quotes such as “the grass is greener on the other side”, “you don’t appreciate something until it’s gone”, and “hold on to the good things in life” all convey the belief that things in your life are the best they can be. That once the blessings in your life are gone, done, or over you will regret that they ever left.
My summer is beginning to feel just like that.
My whole summer was spent trying to find a job, hanging out with my roommate and boyfriend, occasional trips to my parent’s house, and borrowing books from the library. To sum up, I was bored out of my mind. Granted I was enjoying the time off, but two weeks before school started my brain and body started getting that restless feeling that I needed to DO something. I was probably one of the few who was grateful when classes started.
And I feel like I’m going insane.
Now with classes underway, I have TOO much to do and not enough time to do it in. As a commuter student I find myself staying on-campus from 9 in the morning to 8 in the evening, the day filled with classes, appointments, meetings, homework, and trying to take the occasional nap in my car. Once I reach home I microwave myself a meal, try to finish reading for the next day, collapse on my air mattress bed (ah the joys of the poor college student life!), and fall asleep by midnight, 1, or 2 AM (depending on my homework reading). And start the process all over again when I wake up at 7:30-8 in the morning, cursing the day I was born and the rising sun shining through my window.
I changed my mind. Can I have my summer back?
