 |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
           |
blog home | français
Aug 04, 2010
Kung fu? In my Karate Kid?
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Why is a movie about a young boy learning kung fu called The Karate Kid? For most of the film’s young audience, Jaden Smith's break-out movie doesn't explain the confusion. Their parents and older siblings, however, may recall the earlier installments in this series which started with a young Ralph Macchio learning karate from Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, a movie which started as the hero's quest to learn karate to overcome his tormentors and evolved by film's end into a coming-of-age story about the bond between mentor and student. The first Karate Kid struck a chord with audiences, becoming the fifth-highest grossing film of 1984. After two sequels, which did little to alter the formula established by the original and met with dwindling success, A full 26 years after the release of the original, the newest version is once again adding a twist motivated by the changing market. Although this re-imagining of the original story changes up many elements, the most significant one is moving the setting to China. The suggestion to transplant the story overseas was actually the decisive factor which emboldened the producers to green-light the newest chapter despite the lukewarm performance of the last edition. Moving the story to an exotic locale isn't just a case of trying to one-up the original, though: as with the decision to cast a girl in the 90's, the focus on China – and the switch from the hero studying karate, which is of Japanese origin, to learning Chinese kung fu -- in the newest Karate Kid is mostly based on money.
As a result, some studios are trying to make inroads into the Chinese movie market by being proactive about securing those few, precious spots allowed for foreign films. Nods to Chinese culture are one strategy to please film committees, but signing on with local companies is a more committed tactic. Co-productions with Chinese studios (such as The Mummy: the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and The Forbidden Kingdom) are in the fast lane to get onto Chinese screens since they can be vetted by government officers at each stage of production. The Karate Kid remake is actually the biggest Chinese-American co-production in film history, partnered with a state-owned Chinese studio to make sure of government approval. This latest twist on the franchise may be a shrewd move on the part of the film's distributors to reach a tricky market. If the setting alone isn't enough to convince Chinese audiences, martial arts movie legend Jackie Chan -- a household name in China, even moreso than in the Western world, due to his more than 70 roles in both English and Chinese-language films – seems likely to seal the deal. Some foreign film studios are putting down roots inside China on a permanent basis, no doubt motivated by the possibility of circumventing the cap on foreign films. After an initial success with Mulan and later breaking the record for box office sales in the animated film category for Kung Fu Panda, Disney has set up their own studio in China for a local adaptation of their surprise-hit, High-School Musical. In the case of the latter, Disney is planning to simply take advantage of low production costs in China and probably won't release the final product internationally, clearly betting that there is enough money to be made in the Chinese market alone. Of course, Chinese audiences don't uncritically embrace every American production which features some aspect of Chinese culture. Despite financial success, both The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and Kung Fu Panda hit some speed-bumps due to perceived cultural insensitivity. In the case of the former, some movie-goers were outraged that the villain of the movie was loosely based on a venerated Chinese emperor who (spoiler alert) is dispatched by the film's square-jawed Western hero. As for Kung Fu Panda, its release was unfortunately timed around the Sichuan earthquake. As the panda is the symbol for that province, some critics felt it was in bad taste to show a comedy with a panda as the main character and suggested a boycott. While The Karate Kid remake has already raked in more than half of the original's total gross in North America in its opening weekend alone, the release in China is scheduled for a little later. This version has apparently had a few edits, but it remains to be seen how well audiences will tolerate the story of an American boy learning kung fu and (spoiler alert) besting his Chinese tormentors at one of China's oldest sports. Nevertheless, if it is a success it would be a massive step forward in the globalization of American-produced films. China is attractive not only because of its huge consumer base, but also because it is one of only a few markets which Hollywood films haven't broken into yet. A combination of policies which block entry for foreign films and a thriving black market has so far made the middle kingdom a tough nut for Hollywood to crack. Even India, which has its own well-oiled, homegrown movie-making machine, has started warming up to some American-backed productions and turning out impressive profits. There, too, the key has been adapting and being sensitive to the local market rather than repackaging and dubbing old content, but striking the right balance is still a work in progress. For Teachers:
Jun 11, 2010
Pop Quiz
Posted by: Matthew Johnson In this special guest blog, MNet intern and University of Ottawa Communications MA candidate Anton van Hamel looks at how pop stars' images are tailored to different audiences.
Which of these girls looks older?
How about these two?
What about these two?
These photos are actually the same two girls, albeit styled to give very distinct impressions. The top row shows Niatia Kirkland (AKA Lil Mama) on the left and Robyn Fenty (AKA Rihanna) on the right. With both dressed in a partially pulled-down hoodie, neither looks much older than the other. The middle row photos are both of Lil Mama and the bottom row are both of Rihanna. In the middle row, we see Lil Mama in two very different guises. On the left her clothes and pose play up an urban, youthful image: her body is turned away from us but her eyes defiantly stare directly at the viewer, she wears unsubtle, chunky gold jewelry, affects a “don’t care” hairstyle by putting up her hair in a messy ponytail with a sweatband, and shows off a b-girl look with her DIY shoulderless sweater. This photo delivers a very different message from the one on the right, where her apparel and body language have been crafted to emphasise maturity. In this shot Lil Mama’s shoulders are square with our gaze but her eyes are looking elsewhere, projecting a disinterested, adult confidence. She thrusts one hip out, drawing attention to her silhouette which was previously hidden under her baggy “b-girl” outfit. She’s traded her flashy bling for an understated but much more opulent diamond choker and bracelet -- providing in the two shots both youthful and adult variations on the theme of conspicuous consumption. Lastly, her hairstyle is cut short and noticeably coiffed compared to the more youthful pose. With just a change of wardrobe and attitude she appears to gain ten years. In the last pair of photos, Rihanna undergoes the same treatments to come off as a girl and a woman. In this case the major cues are facial expressions, additionally enhanced by attire. On the left, she inclines her head just a tiny bit, beckoning the viewer closer. Her eyes are narrowed a little to make her gaze smolder, accented by the heavy use of black eye-liner. To appeal to our sense of touch, she curls her fingers gingerly around a turtleneck sweater, simultaneously brushing her cheek with her fingers and her chin with the collar. Her lips are held in a purposefully ambiguous not-smile, not-frown, which invites the viewer to project their own reading onto the expression. To top it off, she wears her hair very short to emphasize the delicate, almond shape of her face. Compare this to the more girlish portrait at right, where she sports a sunny smile and looks square into the camera with eyes wide open. She’s still styled to be pretty here, but in a much less seductive way. This shot is more similar to a yearbook portrait than a professional photo shoot. Although images are not a language per se, they do follow rules to reliably produce a particular impression. When considering the role of each sign in an image, there are no hard and fast rules that specific signs always mean the same thing. The French scholar Roland Barthes famously described the flexible nature of connotations of signs in images, with changes in meaning dependant on their position in relation to all the other signs in an image. In the examples above, Lil Mama deploys a bit of androgyny with her b-girl clothes to look more tomboyish and emphasize her youthfulness, while Rihanna’s androgynous hairstyle is an integral part of her grown-up look. The connotations of androgyny change depending on the other signs that go with it in these images, to the point where androgyny is actually being used to play up femininity. People who make their living producing images, such as photographers, stylists, publicists, directors and pop idols, learn how to use those signs to convey the impression they want to make. Although teen girls who are trying to send a signal to their circle of friends and pop music producers who are trying to send a signal to an audience of millions are working on different scales, the principle is very much the same. Depending on your audience, you need to tailor the signals you send out very carefully. Even your age can have a certain amount of wiggle room when dressed in the right signs. No one walks around with their age stamped clearly on their body, but it is usually possible to guess how old someone is by paying attention to the signs they use. In the still photographs above, the producer of each image is making a statement about whether the person you are looking at is a ‘girl’ or a ‘woman’ by using clothes, jewelry, facial expression and body language. For the sake of a fairer comparison, what if we look at a music video for each artist that has been released in the same year? Both videos were chart toppers, both were included in Rolling Stone’s top 100 songs of 2007, and both were nominated for awards (“Lip Gloss” won MTV’s monster single of the year, while “Umbrella” won the Grammy for best rap/sung collaboration) so their level of impact is comparable. More importantly, since they both appeared in the same year, differences in the signals they send aren’t due to differences in changing tastes and fashion. As far as what was ‘in’ at the time, both record companies had access to the same palate to dress up the star of each video. Despite that, the end results are purposefully pretty distinct. Lip Gloss http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eqMeapv2J8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvBfHwUxHIk Umbrella http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvBfHwUxHIk
Although Rihanna only looks older relative to Lil Mama, she is definitely more precocious and seductive in this video. The amount of skin she shows off is only a small part of that image; to maximize the effect, every other aspect has to follow in lockstep with that idea. The dance routine Rihanna performs in the middle with her umbrella is a good example. The ginger, dainty steps and slow dips and rises are more in the spirit of burlesque than R n’ B. Similarly, the monochrome palate of the entire video draws attention away from colour to allow the audience to linger more on the tactile, textural aspect of the footage. The glossy pleather, rainslicked surfaces, and even close-ups on Rihanna’s skin painted silver are all meant to appeal to the sense of touch and fit a more sexed up image. Contrast that impression to the one Lil Mama chooses for the Lip Gloss video. The exposition with her own mother at the opening sets her up as a high-school student and daughter, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The clothes she wears are not particularly feminine (jeans, sweat socks, sweaters) and not at all ‘mature’; they emphasize an unpretentious, youthful look. This extends to the rest of the video, whose entire palate brims with electric, primary colours. There is no subtlety of flavour, just the visual equivalent of eating a fistful of candy. Certain stock characters which appear in the background like the nerd and the principal are played up to a cartoonish effect; a parody of high-school life but which emphasize the kid setting and tone nonetheless. Interestingly enough, when these videos were made, Rihanna was only a year older than Lil Mama, yet because each video tugs the performer so hard in one direction, the margin appears much wider. Lil Mama’s youthfulness is keyed up while Rihanna’s precociousness is amplified. That difference between ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ is only one tip of a multi-pronged image the producers have crafted to attract their target audiences. What kind of audience do you think the producers for each performer want to reach via these images? The album titles work as a pretty concise statement. Whether a performer projects a younger or older persona is not necessarily fixed, of course. Former Disney princess Miley Cyrus recently transition from a squeaky clean pop starlet image to a much more precocious, mature persona. The Atlantic commented on how Cyrus, made famous by her kid-friendly alter-ego Hannah-Montana, is ferociously breaking from her former image to establish herself as a less tame, more adult artist. To that end the producers of her “Can’t Be Tamed” video have carefully borrowed from and alluded to the styles and sounds of previous starlets who have made the transition, notably Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. As mentioned in an earlier MNet post, musical taste is deeply enmeshed with identity, particularly for young people. From a marketing perspective, this observation echoes the fact that consumers establish brand loyalties very early in life, making the youth audience a valuable target group for developing lifelong customers. The transformation from teen starlet to grown-up sex-bomb is driven by economics: performers need to enlarge their audience to reach adults and maintain the loyalty of the original, maturing fan base. Whereas in decades past Cyrus fans might have outgrown the starlet and graduated to a more adult performer (perhaps one supported by the same record label,) the reigning logic now is to maximize consumer loyalty to the star-as-brand and “adultify” her to keep up with the evolving taste of her original fans. This process has very little to do with the starlet’s actual age, but rather through carefully selected and manufactured signs which connote the change. Deconstructing this sort of image after the fact is a fun exercise, but trying your own hand at production is even more interesting. Once you’ve been faced with the same kind of decisions producers make, you can appreciate just how carefully crafted images are. With so much money at stake, producers have very little room for error, so each and every detail counts. The US-based Media Education Lab has designed just such an activity for youth to create a virtual starlet and manage all the little aspects of her look, message, and music. From the splash screen, click the music studio button and then pop music producer. The same site also offers a variety of other games addressing commercial media aimed at girl consumers. For Teachers: • Pop Star Producer gives students a great deal of freedom to combine different lyrics, clothes, and effects. Have students compare and contrast how the exact same sign (a hairstyle, a line of lyrics, etc) in two starlets can be used as part of different overall impressions. How does the connotation of that one sign change when presented alongside several others? • After students have created their starlets, extend the exercise by having them explain which audience each starlet is meant to reach, referring both to individual signs and the combined, overall impression. • An increasingly popular strategy for producers of culture is to make their products more resilient by having more than one fan base built-in. For a real challenge, assign students to create a starlet in Pop Star Producer who can simultaneously reach two different audiences (such as children and adults, or hip hop fans and techno fans). Get students to explain how their starlet strikes a balance between attracting two audiences without alienating either one.
Comments |
Categories:
Advertising & Marketing,
Media Production,
Resources,
Body Image,
Music |
Print
Jan 04, 2010
The Environment Canada hoax: a news story that's full of hot air
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
If anyone still doubts that youth need to learn how to evaluate online information, those doubts should have been dispelled by a recent hoax perpetrated by the group called the Yes Men. This group, which has a history of staging fake press conferences, decided to draw attention to Canada's position at the Copenhagen conference on climate change by creating a number of fake Web sites purporting to be, among others, the Copenhagen summit site, the Wall Street Journal, and Environment Canada's site. While it didn't take long for Environment Canada to make a statement exposing the hoax, by that time many journalists had reported the story as fact and the story had been widely distributed by wire services.
 If professional journalists can't recognize a hoax of this kind, is it fair to expect students to be able to judge the material they find online? The fact is that there were a number of steps that reporters could have taken, and tools they could have used, to check the accuracy of this story -- steps and tools that are available to anyone. The first thing that should have raised a red flag was the URLs or Web addresses of the sites. The fake Environment Canada site's URL was www.enviro-canada.ca, compared to the real Web address which is www.ec.gc.ca (all Government of Canada Web sites end in "gc.ca.") While a student might not know this (though one would expect a reporter to), one easily available clue that there was something wrong with the URL was the fact that the actual site's URL was listed at the top of the page, under the Environment Canada logo. As well, all of the links on the page (which the Yes Men copied from the actual site for verisimilitude) lead to pages on the real site. In other words, every URL associated with the site except the site's “main page” have the "gc.ca" suffix. One of the cleverest aspects of the hoax was that it did not rely just on a single fake site to get its message out. To make the story more convincing, the hoaxers created fake sites for the Copenhagen summit, and the Wall Street Journal that reported their story as fact. This shows the dark side of the notion of "reliable sources": many other journalists who covered the story quite likely gave it credence because they thought it had appeared in the Journal, a newspaper with a nearly impeccable reputation. Indeed, when Environment Canada released a statement condemning the hoax and complaining that many news sources had fallen for it, the example they gave (and linked to) was the fake Wall Street Journal story. The Journal site was a very convincing spoof, but again the URL was a clue to its true nature. Here, though, the Yes Men had been particularly clever: they chose to spoof the Journal's Europe page rather than the main page, most likely thinking readers would be less likely to recognize that their URL (www.europe-wsj.com) was not the correct one (www.europe.wsj.com.)  What else might have given these fake sites away? One useful tool is to conduct a link search. While it's easy enough for a spoof site to copy outgoing links, as the Yes Men did on both the Environment Canada and Wall Street Journal sites, it's harder to reproduce the links that lead to a page from other sites. By using the link: operator in a search engine such as Google, we can see that there are no sites linking into www.europe-wsj.com, while more than 3,000 sites link to www.europe.wsj.com. Another valuable tool is the Alexa Web site, which provides statistics on Web site traffic and allows you to determine how long a Web site has been in existence; for instance, the www.enviro-canada.ca site had no traffic whatsoever before December 7th, while the English home page of the Environment Canada Web site has had consistent traffic going back as far as Alexa reports it (though visits naturally spiked in December.) Similarly, the Twitter account that purported to belong to Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice -- with which he apparently confirmed the press release -- only came into being on December 11th. (Twitter should never be considered a reliable source, of course, given how easy it is to create fake accounts.) None of these steps or tools of course, is of any value if they're not used. What's most important is to develop a healthy skepticism towards every source you might use. In pre-Internet days it may have been enough to check the credentials of a supposed authority; now, as we've seen, the ease of publishing a convincing fake online means you can't even assume that source is who it claims to be. Instead we have to develop habits of mind that will let us spot indications that something is unreliable. One example on the false Environment Canada site would be the fact that the press release is not available in French (an odd oversight, given the Yes Men's otherwise very thorough approach.) A bigger clue is simply the unlikelihood that the Canadian government would reverse its position to that degree on this issue. Of course, this was what made it such a good story, but that's no excuse for not doing the due diligence of investigating your sources. With the number of media outlets available to us today, and the ease with which people can create and distribute material on the Internet, it's important that all of us develop critical filters and habits of mind. Even for journalists, who are trained to be skeptical, it's easy to cut corners (for instance, assuming that the various fake sites created by the Yes Men corroborated one another.) The time is past when we could trust a news outlet to judge for us whether something is true or not: for good or ill, we all must now learn and exercise the investigative skills of good journalism ourselves.
Oct 13, 2009
Interview with Larry Gonick, author of The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Volume II
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
MNet. Why do you say the Cartoon History series is "history as it really happened -- in cartoon format"? What makes cartoons a good medium to write about history? Gonick. When I first said that, I was probably being half glib, but over time I've come to see how much truth there is in that tossed-off line. Cartoons can put badly-needed life back into history. There's no getting around it: historical figures are mostly dead. And traditional textbooks mostly leave them that way. It's hard to sympathize with these historical zombies, to really feel all the passion, thought, conviction, bravery, fear, and, yes, confusion and uncertainty that they experienced. Comics can restore our identification with past actors as living, feeling beings like ourselves, who were as ignorant of their own future as we are of our own. (I say "can" restore, because the comics medium can be misused in the service of history, too. I'm thinking of various history comics where all the characters are idealized jut-jawed types, and everything is rendered in sepia tones. I don't think the past was really sepia!) In addition, the immense number of drawings in a cartoon history provides an opportunity to deliver a wealth of historical graphic detail such as costumes, landscape, and architecture that isn't readily conveyed in text or even a normal illustrated book. The scene becomes part of the narrative in comics. Generally speaking, it's easier to tell stories than to render descriptions or (especially) to explain abstract ideas. But the medium is flexible. The balance of words and images can be adjusted, and they can play off against each other in unexpected ways. In my account of Mecca in Muhammad's day, for example, I wrote a series of narrative blocks that gave an account of its social structure and development—not easy to convey graphically—and superimposed them on images of its empty streets—empty because at the moment the story opens, the town had been evacuated in response to an Ethiopian invasion. Abstract ideas can also be particularized and conveyed through story. And when it comes to story, it's easier to do them when the number of characters is small. Those crowd scenes take a long time to draw! Maybe that's why I've always been more attracted to beginnings, to origins: they are less complicated, provide more degrees of freedom, and fewer actors. It's a bit mysterious, isn't it? My old Pogo collections have fallen apart from repeated reading. As far as I know, comics is the only medium that brings a reader back again and again to the same piece, 20, 50, 100 times. There's just something seductive about that rhythmic combination of words and images. I don't know what it is exactly. Something can strike you funny again and again. Music is the only other art I can think of that repays repetition to this extent. When I started doing this—as a grad student in math, many years ago—I had no faith in the staying power of my own imagination. I would never have become a cartoonist if I had to rely on it. At the time, nonfiction appeared to guarantee an unending supply of material. And this has proved to be true. Very little. Not enough, maybe. I've worked hard to improve the composition of my images and pages, and to tighten up my drawing a bit. But I'm afraid the strain of overstated vulgarity that I started with is still in evidence. Obviously, the long-form comic book, or "graphic novel," has gained some measure of respectability over the past couple of decades. My entry into aboveground publishing came in the 1980s, before the recent boom, and I suppose I'm one of the first to do this kind of work and see it distributed through bookstores as much as, if not more than, through the old comics distribution channel. Since then the business has increased immensely in aggregate. I'm not sure how much this has affected my reception, though. I seem to be chugging along steadily, regardless. By and large, I feel as if I occupy a parallel or maybe orthogonal universe to most modern comics publishing. All of us serial graphicists clearly inhabit the same medium; we share the same narrative and graphic conventions, we cut the page into panels, etc. But so much that comes out now is just grim: so many stories of unhappy childhoods in dysfunctional families. It's as if someone decided that comics had to be deadly serious to be respectable. This may be true, but give me humour any day! By far the biggest challenge is fitting the material into the space. First drafts are never less than twice too long. I do repeated, relentless winnowing to find the essentials in the midst of all the extraneous chaff. This is not fun, especially writing the first draft, when you just know you're going on and on but can't help yourself. The fun parts are in the research; finding wonderful stories and original ideas; in the writing, the final draft, when so much becomes clear; in the drawing, making a really good one, or a good sequence that tells the story well. So many... starting with the reptiles. Yes, reptiles are definitely the most fun. They lack that strain of complex deviousness you see in people, and they're not always making things with a lot of right-angled edges that are so hard to draw. Among humans, I've always been attracted to those with an enlightened outlook in one form or another. The Buddha. Moses. Jesus. Gandhi. I'd say Muhammad, but I never drew him—he stayed off-camera the whole book. Political figures of that ilk included Liu Pang, founder of the Chinese Han Dynasty, and William of Orange, the Silent, who led the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain and established a country where you could think and write what you liked. Also the great scientists. And speaking of complex deviousness, I suppose the villainous ones can be fun, too. The most recent major player of that lot was Philip II of Spain, who bankrupted his country by battling "evil," i.e., Protestants. I also like the ambivalent ones, who combine idealism with impossible ambition, like Bolívar. I've always felt that the very first volume, The Evolution of Everything, was a high point. Many of its attitudes and modes of presentation have found their way into the standard curriculum since it first came out. As for what I was most interested to learn... oh, boy, there's so much. I wouldn't know where to start. One major item would be the central role of that strait between Europe and Asia known as the Hellespont. It never ceases to amaze me that Medieval European history is taught with only minimal reference to the Byzantine Empire, or that early modern history gives so little coverage to the Turks. Cartoonists: [George] Herriman (Krazy Kat), [Walt] Kelly (Pogo), [Harvey] Kurtzman/[Will] Elder/[Wally] Wood (Mad), [Carl] Barks (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge), [John] Stanley (Little Lulu), Rius [pen name of Eduardo del Rio] (the Mexican cartoonist who founded the genre I work in), Lat [pen name of Mohd Nor bin Khalid] (a Malay cartoonist who has done an extraordinary 2-volume autobiography, among other things), [Gilbert] Shelton (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), [Robert] Crumb. Today I mostly read newspaper comics like Dilbert and For Better or For Worse, and a number of webcomics, which I think is an especially exciting area right now. Historians: I don't know who's an influence in terms of narrative style, but I'm partial to several: Herodotus (maybe my closest model), Ssu-ma Chien (the "Herodotus of China"), [Edward] Gibbon, [Joseph] Needham (Science and Civilization in China), [Barbara] Tuchman, [John Julius] Norwich, and several others who have written magisterial books on one subject or another. Names are escaping me at the moment. Most recently, I've loved Simon Schama's Rough Crossings, about the slaves freed by the British during the American Revolution and what became of them. Unfortunately, interactive media haven't changed my work nearly enough. The CD-ROM (thanks for remembering!) is pretty much dead. The web is a great publishing platform, but the comics are still a one-way preachment from the creator to the audience. I'm quite taken with several of them, as well as with the fact that so many are done in black and white. I'd love to take advantage of the computer's potential, but we're still in the infancy of the medium. Maybe I ought to spend more time on Second Life, but my First Life seems to eat up the day. I don't have statistics on this. Teachers do use it. Here in the US, textbooks are adopted on a state-wide basis, and I can't see that happening to the Cartoon History. It's not, em, what's the word, restrained enough. I suppose that sympathetic teachers keep a few copies around and lend them out to students. I've heard from teachers who use them to motivate students to like history; and also from teachers who share them with students who are already motivated and want some extra perspective. And I've heard from plenty of teachers—had an email just this morning—who say that the Cartoon Histories steered them into history in the first place. Today's quote was typical: "thanks to you, I got a 5 on my AP exam in high school." Complicated question, and I probably can't give a coherent answer in a short space. Let's just say that I regard comics as a medium among other media and not as the illegitimate child of "real" books and illustration. One question we might ask ourselves is, how come it's OK for a teacher to be funny, but it's not OK for a textbook to be funny? Regarding comics created by students, I always offer the same advice: leave room for the words! Don't try to squeeze them in around the drawing. The blocks of text are separate graphic elements on their own. Topics for the Cartoon Guides, which are all science books, were chosen with an eye to maximum course enrolment. Rather than do The Cartoon Guide to Relativity (which my coauthor, Art Huffman, originally proposed), the publisher, Harper & Row (now HarperCollins), asked for The Cartoon Guide to Physics. Collaborators have come from several directions: some with unsolicited proposals, others through recommendation, etc. In every case, the collaborator has had two essential qualities: expertise and almost always an academic appointment in the field, and the willingness to spew out text on demand. The cartoon format very much influences the presentation. The unit of information in comics is the page, or the double-page spread. No paragraphs running past the bottom for us! Within each page, information is organized, to the extent possible, as a story that comes to a climax (or sometimes a quiet denouement) when it reaches the lower right-hand corner. I think this is one of the hidden strengths of the medium: graphics aside, it demands a story-like narrative, which, in my opinion, is how we learn most readily. But of course, we don't really put the graphics aside. Designing pages and information structure is an art that requires the creator to consider weight, texture, pacing, and clarity of illustration. The comics medium affords the artist tremendous flexibility. I can "waste" a page with a single panel, either to emphasize something powerfully (it might even be a small illustration surrounded by a lot of white space), or to show a complicated illustration requiring much explanation. I could cite many other patterns of images and words. The choice is governed by the fundamental question: is this the most effective way to convey the information? In the end, that's the overriding consideration.
Jul 29, 2009
Rethinking copyright in the media age
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Media education is essential
To begin with, any new copyright law must recognize that the media environment has changed radically since the Copyright Act was written; even since its last major revision in 1985. Canadians live in a media environment that would have been literally unimaginable to the Act's original drafters. For young people, especially, media form one of the most important parts of their lives: according to a Fast Forward Trend Analysis study, Canadians aged 12 to 14 watched 18 hours of TV a week in 2006 and spent 21 hours a week on the Internet, while those aged 15 to 19 spent 15 hours watching TV and 22 hours online. (Fast Forward Trend Analysis, August 2006) That's not to mention the increasingly sophisticated cell phones, personal audio and video devices, computer and video games and other media sources that youth use to entertain themselves. Simply put, youth are immersed in media almost from day one.
How this media exposure affects youth is very much up to us. Whether or not they are aware of it, youth take values and messages from media. They need to learn to recognize the ways in which those messages are communicated and question and engage with them. From advertising to violence to body image, issues essential to the health and well-being of our youth are tied to media consumption.
More and more, youth are media creators as well. Whether it's participating in social networking sites, writing blogs, filming and posting online videos or crafting user-generated content for video games, new technologies are allowing youth to actively participate in creating media. We are only just beginning to realize the implications of putting media creation and worldwide publication tools into the hands of children and teenagers, marvelling at what they can achieve and fearful of the consequences of the bad choices they can make.
Understanding and participating in the media are also increasingly a part of being an active citizen. As media messages dominate our political debates and tools such as Facebook are used for activism and organizing political movements, it is becoming increasingly important for young people to be able to view media critically in order to participate as citizens of Canada.
In this increasingly complex media world, media literacy is the most effective tool we have to provide children and youth with the necessary critical thinking skills to maximize the benefits of media and new technologies and minimize the risks.
In short, media literacy is essential. Citizens who lack the ability to question, engage with and create media are at a disadvantage as consumers and citizens and are all too likely to be left behind in the knowledge economy. Canada has been a world leader in getting media education into the classroom, to the point where it is now an essential component of the core curricula of all provinces and territories.
Copyright law must make media education possible
How effective media education can be depends in large part on copyright law. The current educational exceptions must be preserved and, in general, the principle of Fair Dealing should be extended to include educational purposes to ensure that teachers are able to provide their students with authentic and meaningful media education tasks and lessons.
To begin with, students need to be able to study media products such as advertisements, movies, and TV shows that are under copyright. Working only with public domain or copyright-cleared material runs the risk of creating a media education program that is too much at odds with students' actual experience of media; it is essential that students be allowed to study and work with the media they themselves consume. This means that teachers must have the ability to record and display/exhibit excerpts of a media product for educational purposes. To achieve this, the current exception – which allows teachers to reproduce media for a test or examination – needs to be expanded to cover general classroom use as well. For instance, the following clip, an annotated version of the film The Royal Tenenbaums, which layers commentary onto movie's opening sequence, would likely be illegal under the current Copyright Act:
Teachers should be given the ability to use excerpts of media products for legitimate educational purposes without having to seek permission or pay royalties, with a further exception made for very short programs (such as TV commercials) where recording and showing the full piece would be permitted.
To ensure that media education programs continue to grow and evolve, teachers need to be able to shift media products between formats for educational purposes (e.g. creating a compilation of clips for class study); for that reason legitimate educational activity must be exempted from any provisions covering format-shifting. Moreover, the spirit of the educational exception should not be undermined by other clauses such as those covering "digital locks". Teachers should also be able to sample and excerpt from copyrighted works in order to publish and distribute media education lessons, activities and best practices to other educators.
Finally, copyright law should allow students to deconstruct and parody media products for educational purposes. Creation and reconstruction of media products is a key pillar of media education, and requires that students have the ability to excerpt and remix some or all of a media product for educational purposes. It is essential that students learn to create and remix media as well as to view it critically; not giving students the tools to manipulate media products is like teaching them to read without teaching them to write. For example, the following video, a student project which analyzes the effects of the media on body image among women and girls, would likely be illegal under the current Copyright Act:
It should be noted that these changes to the Copyright Act, while extensive, are not out of line with educational exceptions found in the copyright laws of other countries. The US Fair Use doctrine gives educators and students wide latitude to use copyrighted materials in schools. Closer to our own legal tradition, the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act already contains several measures similar to those outlined above, and the UK Intellectual Property Office has proposed changes to copyright exceptions that would expand those still further.
Canadian youth need to be educated about copyright and other intellectual property issues
As well as learning about the media, youth need to be taught about the various aspects of intellectual property law. It's clear that the public in general, and youth in particular, are poorly informed about copyright issues; a 2008 Environics study on Canadians' attitudes towards intellectual property labelled the largest group "the Impressionables" due to their tendency to look to others for cues on such issues as file-sharing and illegal downloading. The less well-informed the public is, the more we risk letting the debate be dominated by extreme positions.
A lack of education on intellectual property issues also makes it more difficult for youth to abide by the law in their media use. A study conducted in the UK ("UK adults turn their nose up at content owners' right to royalties," Telindus, July 2009) found that a majority of those polled believed that copyright had no force on the Internet, with posted and uploaded material being "free for all." If youth are not taught about copyright law – including the issues and debates around intellectual property in the Internet age – they cannot be faulted for not abiding by it. Teachers, too, need to be informed about their rights to use copyrighted material in the classroom – especially if the changes outlined above are enacted – in order to provide students with a meaningful education in media issues.
As Canada's economy continues to move away from manufacturing, more of us will become producers of intellectual property, but the same UK study found that only a quarter of those polled knew what rights they possessed to material they had created and posted online. A healthy, widely-obeyed and up-to-date Copyright Act is essential both to the success of Canada's economy and to our youth's ability to succeed as knowledge workers and media creators.
Nov 03, 2008
New online resources for teachers
Posted by: Matthew Johnson The Web is full of great online resources for teachers and students, with new material appearing every day. With the arrival of National Media Education Week, teachers may be looking for fresh ideas to bring media education into the classroom. Here’s a quick overview of recently created (or recently discovered) resources that may help:
 One of the best resources for media studies classes is the Opening Shots Project, which provides shot-by-shot analyses of the opening shots of dozens of movies, from “Pan’s Labyrinth” to “His Girl Friday.” Best of all for classroom use, each analysis includes stills illustrating the shots being discussed. Jim Emerson, the project founder, explains its purpose this way: “Any good movie -- heck, even the occasional bad one -- teaches you how to watch it. And that lesson usually starts with the very first image… The opening shot can tell us a lot about how to interpret what follows. It can even be the whole movie in miniature.” Opening Shots Project is an invaluable demonstration of close reading of film.
 To see how a particular filmmaker’s vision evolved and changed over the course of a project, check out Starkiller: The Jedi Bendu Script Site, which focuses on the development of George Lucas’ Star Wars. This site houses several narratives explaining the process Lucas went through in creating the film, starting from his influences – ranging from Flash Gordon serials, which influenced the science-fiction setting, to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, which provided most of the movie’s plot – and explaining how Luke Skywalker went from being a grizzled and cynical old general to the innocent hero of the finished film. Not only that, but the site features several of Lucas’s original scripts– including an illustrated draft with early character designs – and even rejection letters from studios.
 A key concept in media education is the idea that media have commercial implications – that the creation of media products is influenced by the corporations that create and distribute them. This can be a difficult idea to communicate to students, however, because of the complex web of corporate ownership surrounding most media companies, which keep the actual owner’s agenda distant from the final product. Two resources to help make this idea more concrete for students are The Columbia Journalism Review’s Who Owns What site, which provides a list of those media companies owned by major corporations as well as a series of articles on media ownership, and Who Owns What On Television?, which takes much of the same information and represents it graphically, showing the major media companies owned by General Electric, Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, CBS and Viacom.
Classroom activities
1. Using the Opening Shots Project as a model, have students analyze the opening scene of a film of their choice, examining it shot-by-shot to determine what the opening scene establishes about the movie’s tone, genre, mood, motifs and themes.
2. Have students read the original “Star Wars” story synopsis and compare it to the final movie. What characters, settings and themes are already present? What significant changes were made? Students will likely find that the original synopsis bears little resemblance to the actual film, at least on the surface. Have them speculate on why Lucas might have made some of the changes he did.
3. Show students the diagrams from Who Owns What on Television and ask them to consider the following questions:
Jul 18, 2008
Covering controversy
Posted by: Matthew Johnson  The hottest media story in the past week has been the instantly infamous New Yorker cover portraying Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as terrorists. Though the Obama campaign has been measured in its response, media outlets – and particularly bloggers – have been vocal in their disapproval. Some have suggested that the cover crosses the line from satire into hate speech, while others accuse The New Yorker of giving ‘aid and comfort to the enemy’ by visually depicting the smears and misconceptions that have been aimed at the candidate.Because of the promotional value of a magazine’s cover – despite being told otherwise, we often do judge (and buy) books and magazines by their covers – editors often intentionally court controversy when commissioning them. What makes a cover controversial? What process went into the creation of the Obama cover, and why has it provoked so much more outcry than other satirical magazine covers?
Deconstructing a controversial cover
When looking at covers that are intentionally controversial– as distinguished from those that become controversial for reasons not intended by the editors, like the infamous doctored O.J. Simpson cover in which the football player and accused murderer was presented with darkened skin – there are a number of things that turn up again and again, that are more or less guaranteed to create controversy.
Sex
 As the adage puts it, sex sells, and even such venerable institutions as Newsweek have used it in such covers as June 1989’s “Hurrah for the Bra” (no picture, sorry). For editors, though, sex is a problematic way of creating controversy: too little and there’s no story, too much and your cover won’t be displayed. One solution has been to use images that are relatively tame in terms of exposure but controversial due to context. The classic example of this is Vanity Fair’s August 1991 cover featuring Demi Moore naked and pregnant. Despite the relative tameness of the cover image – it is less revealing than the average Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover – it led to widespread debate and, in some cases, outrage; in many places the magazine was covered or even pulled from shelves. The issue was not that Moore was naked but that she was pregnant: a sexualized “glamour shot” of a mother-to-be proved to be too much for some readers to bear. If there’s any doubt that sexualizing motherhood remains a taboo, the controversy over the August 2006 issue of babytalk should put it to rest. This cover led to nearly a thousand angry letters and e-mails from readers who called it “gross,” some saying they hid the magazine rather than let it be seen in their home. (Gayle Ash, who shredded her copy, explained that "I don't want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn't want to see.")
Religion
 Most magazine editors tread warily when dealing with religion, an inherently controversial topic. For those courting controversy, though, it is invaluable. One of the most infamous Time covers is the one at left, both for the message and the format. In an unusual move for Time – which made its reputation presenting photojournalism – there is no image, only text. The text itself, red on a black background, is also unique. Most arresting, though, is the question it poses: Is God Dead? Writers like Richard Dawkins can still be provocative by raising similar questions today; in 1966 it was considered incendiary. Testament to the power of this cover is the fact that nobody remembers what the cover story was actually about: the Death of God movement, a loose group of theologians who were grappling in different ways with the apparent absence of God from the modern world. While the movement was quickly forgotten the cover was not, being widely referred to in such pop culture artefacts as the movie Rosemary’s Baby.Race
 In the United States, of course, race is guaranteed to be the most controversial topic (as The New Yorker’s editor has no doubt learned). Race alone, though (except racial caricature), isn’t enough to cause a stir. But when it is combined with one of the other controversial issues, such as religion (as seen at left, in the April 1968 issue of Esquire titled “The Passion of Muhammad Ali,” where the boxer is portrayed as Saint Sebastian, riddled with arrows) or sex (as in the April 2008 cover of Vogue showing LeBron James clutching white model Gisele Bundchen in a King Kong-like pose,) race seems to act as an accelerant: what might be mildly controversial becomes very controversial.
  This may be where The New Yorker went wrong: underestimating just how much the messages about race, religion, patriotism and terrorism would add up to. There was no question they knew the cover would be controversial – as editor David Remnick told the Huffington Post, “What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama's – both Obamas' – past, and their politics.” They likely did not guess just how controversial it would be, expecting it to draw the same amount of attention as some of Barry Blitt’s earlier satirical covers (the magazine has put a gallery of covers on its Web page, which you can see here.) Unlike the other covers, though – such as the one above satirizing George W. Bush’s relationship with Vice President Cheney – the cover combines controversial topics: besides the picture of Osama Bin Laden it brings religion into the picture by depicting Obama in a costume associated with the Taliban, and the issue of race is underscored by Michelle Obama’s Black Panther costume and the fist-bump greeting the two share.  That fist-bump points to the other reason why the cover’s controversy may have exceeded expectations: it was based on a news hook that did not remain news for long enough. Unlike in the issue at left, where readers could be expected to remember both U.S. Senator Larry Craig’s arrest for “foot touching” in a men’s room and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York, the Obama cover was based on something that faded quickly: Fox News host E.D. Hill’s referring to the fist-bump gesture – properly called, according to word maven William Saffire, a “dap” – as a “terrorist fist jab.” If that story had remained in the news it might have been clearer that it was Fox News, and other media outlets of a similar political bent, that were the targets of the cover’s satire.It remains to be seen whether this cover will be good or bad for The New Yorker’s sales, though most analysts seem to feel the effect will be a negative one – that it is possible for a cover to be too controversial. Nevertheless, while editors will no doubt take a lesson and be careful in how they portray Obama (at least until after the election), there’s no doubt that they will continue to court controversy – because selling the magazine is what the cover is all about.
Questions for classroom discussion
Jul 15, 2008
Beyond the Screen
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Media educator John Pungente’s series Beyond the Screen, airing on Bravo!, now has its own Web site, where teachers can find resources and tips on integrating the series into their classrooms. Father John Pungente, a longtime media educator and founding Board member of MNet, planned the series as a follow-up to his acclaimed Scanning the Movies. Like its predecessor, Beyond the Screen is intended as a way of teaching viewers to “read” movies. In Beyond the Screen Pungente uses clips from current movies and interviews with cast and crew to shed light on filmmaking techniques, genre, and theme. The Web site offers showtimes and previews of upcoming episodes and links to teachers’ guides. (So far the only guide that’s been posted is for Speed Racer, but the guide for The Dark Night should be up shortly; upcoming episodes on Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince should be popular as well.)
As a Canadian pioneer in media education, Pungente has had a long career of opening audiences’ eyes to the craft and the meaning to be found behind movies. As he puts it, "There are few people who have not seen The Wizard of Oz. One of my favourite moments comes toward the end of the movie when Dorothy pulls aside the curtain and reveals the truth about the wizard. In Beyond the Screen, we want to pull back the curtain on the movies we watch."
You can learn more about Beyond the Screen at www.beyondthescreen.com.
Apr 23, 2008
With a little help from my friends
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Note: this is the third in a series of columns looking at the history and future of Web 2.0.
It all started with a spreadsheet.
In the last instalment of this series we looked at some of examples of user-created media such as mashups, fan movies and machinima. One thing all three forms have in common is that in each case the Internet is not a means of creating content but of delivering it. One of the unique features of computers, though, is their flexibility as a tool: they can be programmed to make doing almost anything easier – and that includes making media.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. As we noted in the first instalment, one of the reasons why the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic is so deeply ingrained in the computer world is because it has its roots in hobbyist culture. The original Apple was actually a DIY kit – users received a complete circuit board but had to add their own case, keyboard, monitor and power supply. Even that, though, was a step away from the DIY nature of other personal computers of the day, which required users to assemble the circuit board.
By the time the Apple II was introduced little evidence of its hobbyist origins remained: the case, keyboard, monitor and circuit board all came from the same company in the same package. What really made the computer a success, though, was the software that was available for it – a program called Visicalc, the very first spreadsheet. For the first time a computer could actually make the average person’s life easier, helping people with home and business budgets and even their taxes. From that point on the computer world would be divided into two camps. One believed that computers should make things easier, while the other believed that anything worth doing with computers – and computers themselves – should be hard.
Much of what was covered in the last column can be seen as typical of the “hard path.” Painstakingly matching beats and pulling samples to blend two albums together into a seamless whole, duplicating the sets and costumes of a forty-year-old TV series to shoot new episodes, using software intended for first-person shooter games to tell stories – all of these take enormous amounts of effort and commitment. The “soft path,” though, is equally well-represented in Web 2.0, providing a variety of tools which allow users to become creators without having to go to the extremes found in the last column.
One way in which the Web is making it easier to become a “media author” is by bringing creators together. A good example is Pathetic Geek Stories, a website that lets people submit embarrassing stories to be illustrated by cartoonist Maria Schneider. For whatever reason, Schneider never has any shortage of submissions – there are over a hundred stories archived on the site – and the ones she chooses to draw range from the simply silly, like this one, to the genuinely heartbreaking. Schneider’s work, in its focus on the smallest of life’s details, is reminiscent of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. Pekar is generally thought to be the overall author of his work even though it is drawn by a variety of artists; Schneider, on the other hand, draws from stories sent to her by many different contributors. This brings up a question that will come back repeatedly in looking at these collaborations: who is the actual author? Schneider’s submission guidelines make it clear that she owns the copyright to the finished product, but authorship is a somewhat trickier question than copyright.
The question becomes even more complicated with more user-oriented sites like Bitstrips, a free online tool for making cartoons. Bitstrips allows the user to choose how much artistic control she wants to have: users may draw on a catalogue of established characters or create their own (a process which itself has several levels of complexity available.) The results tend to look fairly similar – there’s a definite “house style” that results from the character creator, so that most wind up looking like this – but for those that want it there’s enough flexibility to create much more distinctive-looking cartoons like this one. So far the content on Bitstrips is better enjoyed as an experiment than as art, but what’s more interesting about it is the sense of it being a community: users are encouraged to share their characters, to be used in other comics on the site. As well, each strip is accompanied by a space for reader comments, which makes the experience more like reading a blog than a traditional cartoon. Bitstrips has addressed the copyright question in a King Solomon-like fashion, dividing the rights equally between the user and the site, but the question of authorship can’t be resolved so neatly. Who, for instance, is the author of a strip created by one user featuring characters created by another and using a technique discovered by a third? (Bitstrips is just out of its beta testing period, and many of the bugs discovered by early users have been incorporated as features.) Or is the whole idea of authorship irrelevant in Bitstrips’ collaborative culture?
A more corporate attempt to develop a similar resource is Electronic Arts’ The Sims Carnival, which extends its popular Sims franchise into user-created content. The Sims Carnival, currently in a closed beta-test stage, provides tools that allow users to create their own games. Like Bitstrips, The Sims Carnival offers its users several levels of engagement: at the simplest, a program called “The Wizard” functions as a general-purpose “modding” tool, allowing users to customize one of several genres of games. Much more involved is “The Game Creator,” which allows for a tremendous range of creativity – games created so far include Bird vs. Cat, an action game whose graphics look (intentionally) like something you might find on the door of the family fridge; Wash the Dog, which features the grooming of a photorealistic mutt; the irreducible Stick Man Hammer Throw; and of course any number of more typical action games.
The wide variety and individuality of these games raises a still more complex question of authorship: unlike Pathetic Geek Stories, all of whose entries are scripted and drawn by Schneider, or Bitstrips, in which most of the cartoons are made with templates provided by the site, many of the games found on The Sims Carnival have content which is entirely original to the users. Electronic Arts has stated clearly that the games created are not property of the users (though users are allowed to link to them from other sites). The Sims Carnival seems to be aspiring to create the kind of collaborative culture found on Bitstrips – every user has the right to modify or borrow elements from any other user’s games. A major difference is that Carnival is eventually intended to be a money-making venture, both for Electronic Arts and the content-generating users (exactly how this will work has not yet been revealed). Whether the collaborative culture of 2.0 can survive a collision with the profit principle remains to be seen. The problem of authorship is inherent in nearly all user-created content – who is the author of The Grey Album? – but the “soft path” throws it into sharp relief. Is the author of a game created using The Sims Carnival the user who designed the gameplay and the graphics, or the company that built the tools with which the game was made? We wouldn’t say that The Sun Also Rises was co-authored by the company that built Hemingway’s typewriter: on the other hand, Hemingway could just as easily have written his book in longhand or, had such things existed in his day, on a word processor. Although the typewriter facilitated the novel, it wasn’t necessary to produce it. But the games featured on The Sims Carnival, and the cartoons on Bitstrip, would not be possible without the tools provided by those sites.
Perhaps more important than the authorship issue is the fact that nobody on any of these sites seems much concerned. The same is true with user-created content in general: it’s not so much that users are willing to give up their authorship rights, as we’ll see in a later column, so much as that they’ve abandoned the idea of authorship altogether. Instead of intellectual property, the model is a commons – where Sims Carnival users modify each others’ games, Bitstrips users share their characters, and the makers of Star Trek: Phase II lend their re-created sets to the makers of other Star Trek re-enactors. After two hundred years of exalting the individual artist, we may be moving back to a focus on the community. In our next instalment we’ll be looking at a Web 2.0 phenomenon that is all about community, crowdsourcing.
For Classroom Discussion
Apr 14, 2008
DIY Media: Mashups, fan movies, and machinima
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Note: this is the second in a series of columns looking at the history and future of Web 2.0.
In the last instalment of this series we examined the origins of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic and some of the issues around the definition of “user-created content.” Turning from the theoretical to the practical, we’ll now take a look at just what is actually out there, and begin to examine some of the ethical and legal implications.
Mashups. Perhaps the most well-known type of user-created media is the mashup, a mixture of two (or more) pre-existing works to create something new. The most famous of these is The Grey Album, a mashup of vocal tracks from Jay-Z’s Black Album with samples from the Beatles album The Beatles (better known as “The White Album” due to its all-white jacket). The Black Album tracks had actually been released by Jay-Z with the intention of making it easier to remix them, pointing to hip-hop culture as another forebear of the modern DIY movement. It’s long been standard practice for hip-hop artists to encourage remixes by releasing their vocal tracks, as Jay-Z did, in the hopes of building word-of-mouth and encouraging fan involvement. Unlike most remixers, though, the producer Danger Mouse (a pseudonym for London DJ and producer Brian Burton) did not lay his own beats onto the vocal tracks but rather used samples from The Beatles.
The Grey Album episode included many elements that were typical of the mashup as a whole, so it’s worth exploring this in detail. To begin with was the legal issue: EMI, which owns the copyright to the Beatles tracks used, served Burton with a cease-and-desist order when he began distributing copies of the album. Although Burton complied, by that point several people who had received copies had uploaded them onto the Internet. When many of these download sources also received cease-and-desist orders from EMI one of them, a site called Downhill Battle, organized an event called “Grey Tuesday” to protest. On February 24, 2004, more than a hundred Web sites offered the album for download for a twenty-four hour period. This signalled a new activism within the online community, advocating for the right to use samples without obtaining permission from the rights holders. We’ll be looking at this issue in greater detail in a later instalment, but for now it’s worth noting that the owners of both the recordings and the songs themselves are corporations – EMI and Sony. It would be interesting to know what the reactions might have been if the Beatles themselves had still owned the rights to either one.
Another issue illustrated by The Grey Album (and a legal concern, as we’ll see in a later column) is the attitude that mashups are not original works of art, but rather the musical equivalent of Mad Libs or Paint-by-Numbers. It’s true that The Grey Album inspired many mashups that were, well, less inspired – but the trick in many works of art is to make it look easy. In fact The Grey Album received notice for more than just novelty. The New Yorker profiled Burton, looking in detail at the effort that had gone into the album’s creation, and it was named the best album of 2004 by Entertainment Weekly. Despite the crudeness implied by the term “mashup”, the album’s creation took considerable finesse: “It would have been easy just to slap the vocals over music of the same tempo,” Burton told the New Yorker. “But I wanted to match the feel of the tracks, too.” In an interview with MTV Burton said that the album took him two weeks of non-stop work: “The first thing the producer did was listen to The Black Album a cappella and measure the amount of beats per minute for each track, a common technique for club DJs who seamlessly mix music together. Next, he scoured all 30 songs on The White Album, listening for every strike of a drum or cymbal when other instruments or voices were not in the mix. Most were single sounds, which he would later put together to make beats.”
Although most mashups are still done with songs, the idea has spread to other media as well. Mashup videos – mostly short clips -- range from the satirical to the simply silly: from If Dick Cheney Was Scarface, which puts dialogue from that movie into the Vice President’s mouth, to Clint Eastwood’s The Office, which imagines the sitcom as made by the director of such violent movies as Unforgiven. While few of these have the inspired quality of The Grey Album, the mashup has become an established genre – and, for better or worse, the form most widely associated with online user-created media.
Fan movies. Taking things one step further are fan movies. These are original movies (some feature-length) that use characters and settings from pre-existing properties such as Star Trek and Star Wars. Although the writing of “fan fiction” is not new – it dates back at least as far as the early 1970s, when Star Trek fans began writing original stories following the cancellation of that series – it is only recently that fans have begun making video content. In part this is due to the availability of digital video cameras and editing software, but another cause is certainly the ability to make the films widely available through the Internet. Making even a short film, after all, is a complicated project, and if your only expected audience is your friends and family you’re unlikely to see it through. A fan film made today, though, might easily be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, and as a result some truly ambitious works have been created.
Fan movies fall into two broad types. The first is straight-forward fan fiction, “untold” stories that might easily fit within the canon of the particular property. An example of this is Star Trek: Phase II, which aspires to create a “fourth season” of the original series. Phase II, like most fan films of this type, treats the original material with something approaching reverence: it has, for instance, filmed scripts written by original series writers David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana. At the same time, these fan films often reflect the fans’ own interpretations and desired changes to the material; Gerrold’s episode, for example, is an adaptation of one he wrote for the Next Generation spinoff series and which was never filmed due to its dealing with homosexuality and AIDS.
The second type of fan film is humorous and satirical. This is often done by blending the original material with a more mundane element: Troops, the first of these films to get much attention, portrays Star Wars’ Stormtroopers in the style of the reality show Cops. Another, Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager, imagines the life of Darth Vader’s less ambitious brother. Though funny, these films are rarely satirical in the way that mashups often are: while less faithful than the fan fiction movies, these too show a tremendous affection for the original material.
Machinima is perhaps the least-known type of user-created media; it’s also the one most intimately tied to the online medium. That’s because machinima is actually made using existing computer programs – either animating characters in virtual worlds such as Second Life or using computer games to create narratives. (In some cases this is done through co-operative play – every user in a multi-user game agrees to act out their part in the story – and in some cases it is done through the “modding” functions of games like Doom, described in the last column.) Many machinima have a relationship to these games similar to that between fan movies and their inspirations; the machinima Red Vs. Blue mocks Halo in much the same way as Troops does Star Wars. Others use the game merely as a jumping-off point, such as the Busby Berkeley-style musical numbers staged within the multiplayer game Star Wars Galaxies (there has, inevitably, also been Star Trek machinima, most notably the feature-length Borg War.) Whereas fan films are essentially movies delivered through the Internet, machinima can best be compared to puppetry – or perhaps to the theatre. The machinima ethic of telling a story with already-available tools calls to mind the director Peter Brooks’ famous statement that “I can take any empty space and call it a stage.” In machinima, the game is the stage.
These three forms are really just the beginning of the user-created media available on the Internet; we haven’t addressed webcomics, one of the earliest kinds of online user-created media, or newer ideas such as Muxtape (a Web site that lets users submit and download mp3 “mixtapes”) and wikinovels. Nor have we touched on the user-created content that lets people “answer back” to the messages they receive from commercial media, such as the anti-violence game Soul Control.
It can be easy to dismiss user-created media; all too often it is juvenile, poorly made or obsessively focused on “fannish” material. Much of it is no different from what, in earlier generations, was filmed on Super 8 cameras or just acted out in living rooms However, as noted in the previous installment, the key difference is the use of Internet as a method of delivery. That is what allowed The Grey Album to be on many music critics’ top ten lists, allowed the fan movie Fanboys to be released by a major studio, allowed an episode of Star Trek: Phase II to be nominated for a Nebula (one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction) and allowed an Emmy-winning episode of South Park to be made using the online game World of Warcraft. In our next installment, we’ll look at a number of services which appeared to make user-created media more accessible to the less technically adept.
For Classroom Discussion
Apr 03, 2008
Do It Yourself
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Image © Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library
Note: this is the first in a series of blogs looking at the history and future of Web 2.0. From Facebook pages to viral Barack Obama speeches, the latest boom to hit the media is the rise of user-created content. Services such as Facebook and YouTube have created a new business model: rather than selling content to consumers, as media companies traditionally have done, they provide the means for consumers to make and distribute their own content (or, as an anonymous contributor on bash.org put it, “You make all the content, they get all the revenue.”) The resulting movement, called Web 2.0 by some to distinguish it from the older content-delivery model, has already made fortunes, stealing both employees and the cutting-edge image of companies like Google. Exactly what user-created content is, however, remains a matter for debate. This is not surprising: with its roots in the 1970s DIY (“Do It Yourself”) culture, which itself sprang from the authenticity-obsessed punk movement, the question of whether or not something is “really” user-created content is bound to be a controversial and political issue. While an opposition to consumerism was an essential part of the early DIY movement, today’s user-created content largely stems from a desire to participate in the creation of consumer culture. One reason for this is that today’s DIY is a hybrid, born not only from the anti-consumerist movement, but also from computer culture. What makes computer culture unique among media is that, for most of its history, it has consisted largely of user-created content. The earliest computer games, such as Spacewar and Colossal Cave, were amateur products created during slack time on university mainframes and then passed around from lab to lab without hope of profit. Early home computer systems, such as the Apple II, came with programming languages like BASIC installed, which allowed users to create their own programs – the same as if every TV came with a simple video camera. Many games also included “modding” tools, used to create customized content; “Lode Runner,” which allowed users to create their own levels, became one of the most popular games for the Apple II. Unlike other media, then, in computers the line between content creators and consumers was thin-to-nonexistent from the beginning, and nearly all creators started out as fans. What brought the two parents of user-created content – the DIY movement and computer culture – together was the Internet. While the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s had been largely the province of people who identified themselves as computer hobbyists, the introduction of graphic browsers such as Mosaic – and its successor Netscape – made the Internet as user-friendly as Macintosh and Windows had made computers. While the first generation of Internet services tried to make a business of providing content to users, it became clear that users were at least as interested in creating that content themselves. How much user-created content is actually out there? According to a 2006 Pew Internet and American Life survey, just over one in three Internet users have created some kind of online content, such as an online video, a Web site, a blog or a social networking profile page. (It’s worth noting that Facebook was not open to the general public until September of 2006, too late to be reflected in the study.) There is now enough user-generated content out there to support services devoted to cataloguing, sifting and exploring it, such as Digg, MetaFilter and StumbleUpon. Neither “Web 2.0” nor “user-created content” are terms with simple definitions. Whether a Facebook profile page, for instance, truly counts as user-created content is a matter of some debate; similarly, YouTube contains as many clips of movies and TV shows as it does material created by its users. Some people feel, as well, that the whole notion of user-created content gives credibility to an outdated division between users and producers. Even the term “Web 2.0” has come under scrutiny, with some calling it nothing but a marketing device, and others saying it simply describes what the Internet has been all along. (Stephen Fry has compared social networking sites to the old “closed” online communities such as Compuserve or America Online.) What, then, is user-created content? Who is a user, and who is a creator? Ralph Koster, a designer on one of the first massively multiplayer online games, has suggested that all users are creators: even playing a simple video game involves the user in creating a narrative. Koster notes that not all activities require the same amount or level of creative input, but he’s surely right in saying that there are no passive consumers. Even someone watching TV or reading a book is involved in a collaboration with that product’s authors – interpreting characters, anticipating plot events, judging the morality of actions. The key element of user-created content is not the actual content: it is how that content is delivered to an audience that may range from the single digits to the millions. In the next instalment, we’ll look at new genres and media that have their roots in Web 2.0. For Classroom Discussion
Mar 18, 2008
A laptop in every pot
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
The old saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer applies to cyberspace, too: these maps comparing router and population density show that the developing world has a long way to go to catch up to North America, Western Europe and Japan when it comes to getting online. The One Laptop Per Child project aims to change all that, designing, constructing and distributing Internet-ready laptops to children in developing countries.
The organization, founded by Nicholas Negroponte, is not the first to embark on this mission – earlier efforts include the Simputer and the Ndiyo – but it has been the most successful so far. A big part of their job has been designing a laptop that can be used in a variety of situations and under sometimes harsh conditions: the computer, called the XO, is substantially sturdier than most, with a thick plastic case and flash-memory hard drive to let it survive falls and other impacts and a rubber keyboard and seal that protect it from water.
The differences are aesthetic as well as functional: the XO, with its friendly green and white case, looks more like a toy than a computer. Its screen can rotate and swivel, allowing it to be used in either laptop or tablet configurations. While it comes with a built-in microphone and video camera, as well as graphics and music programs, its most essential feature is its antenna, which allows it to access wireless networks from a significant distance away: the “ears” (antennae) of the XO act as a relay for the Internet to the next XO, further in the bush. The network sustains itself, regardless of the infrastructure of the country. While the hand-crank found on early models is gone, a solar panel and a pull-string are available to provide the two watts of power the XO requires.
Another part of the XO’s appeal is that in many developing countries teachers are very scarce, and generally prefer to teach in cities than in more distant areas. This means that in rural areas school children can go for days, weeks, without seeing a teacher. The XO is intended to be a ‘school in a box’: it is always there, doesn’t need any equipment besides itself, and governments can add programs to cover the country’s curriculum.
Supporters of the project have generally been swayed by its clever design; critics have focused on the politics. One early criticism, that there were children going without computers in the United States, eventually led to an announcement that the XO would be made available there – and the launch of the “Buy One, Get One” campaign that would give people in North America a chance to get an XO while also putting one in the hands of a child in the developing world.
A broader question raised by critics is whether children in developing countries want or need a laptop. Dr. Igwe Aja-Nwachuku, Nigeria’s education minister, said in an interview with the BBC "What is the sense of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in, where they don't have facilities?" Nigeria has, in fact, cancelled its original order of one million laptops, and commitments from countries including Brazil and Thailand have evaporated.
One reason for the XO’s setbacks has been price: originally intended to retail for around $100 US, they are currently priced at $199. However, Negroponte told an audience at the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting that he expected the price to fall to its original target by the end of 2009, and to reach $50 by 2011.
Some critics, though, question whether putting a laptop on the desk of every child is a good idea at any price, wondering whether the money could be better spent elsewhere. In the words of John Dvorak, “in the Asian, African, and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called ‘absolute poverty.’ Every year, 15 million children die of hunger… One in 12 people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5.” If we imagine a finite pool of aid money, then diverting some of it to support the XO means taking it away from projects aimed at providing food, shelter and clean water to developing countries. Similarly, some have suggested that this is just another form of colonialism, training children in developing countries to consume the West’s technology rather than their own – an argument supported by the efforts of Microsoft and Intel to make sure that their technology, rather than the XO’s, is adopted in the developing world.
Many of these objections are drawn from the underlying assumption that the developing world will follow the same path that the West has in going online. Much of the evidence, though, suggests otherwise. In many developing countries cell phones have put the power to communicate in the hands of people who never had access to landlines, and the same may happen with the Internet. Instead of acting as passive consumers of Western media, many developing nations have begun to use the Web for their own purposes: Ushahidi, described in detail in an earlier blog post, is one example. Another is Global Voices, a compilation of blogs from all over the world – including a number of nations where blogging is the only way for citizens to communicate without censorship. Already, students using the XO in Uruguay have begun creating and posting content of importance to them, such as this film of a calf being born. If giving each child a laptop means giving her a voice, it’s hard to argue against it.
For Classroom Discussion
Feb 14, 2008
The world in a one-inch screen
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
In Japan, cell phones and texting are much more widespread among young people than they are here. Much of what we do on computers is done through phones there, with the result that those students that own cell phones spend an average of two hours a day on them. Japanese TV dramas even feature scenes where the dialogue is entirely done through texting, with characters thumb-typing furiously while the messages appear as subtitles. Now another part of life has been squeezed onto the one-inch screen, resulting in the creation of the cell phone novel.
The typical cell phone novel is written by, as well as for, young women: the website Maho no i-land, which ‘publishes’ many of the books, says that most of the authors are women in their early twenties, while users are largely between fifteen and twenty-five. Unusually for Japanese fiction the text is written horizontally, rather than vertically, to make it easier to read on the small screen, and the novels arrive in bite-size instalments that add up to a total of 200 to 500 screen-pages. Authors are not typically paid, but submit their work in hopes that it will eventually be published on paper: one book, “If You,” became the number five bestseller of 2007.
Unsurprisingly, this boom in handheld reading has drawn some criticism. There is little effort in most of the novels to develop character or create evocative imagery; instead the reading experience mimics that of texting, focusing on dialogue that is written in short phrases and even emoticons. Lovers of modern Japanese literature, which has tended to be heavy on emotionally charged and evocative imagery, have disparaged the cell phone novels as being more akin to comic books than literature. The Japanese literary journal Bungaku-kai even ran a cover story entitled “Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?”
Many cell phone novel authors, as well as their publishers, argue that the form is not drawing away readers from traditional novels but rather appealing to non-readers. A cell phone novelist who goes by the byline ‘Rin’ told The New York Times that her generation was uninterested in traditional novels: “They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them.”
Even literary critics have been open to considering the novels: Mikio Funayama, a spokesman for the journal Bungaku-ri, said that "Although cell phone novels were initially snubbed by traditional writers, they reflect our time. They could develop into a new literary genre so we must keep our minds open."
Will cell phone novels cross the Pacific? It’s hard to say. Besides the higher rate of cell phone use, people in Japan are much more likely to use public transit, where they’re free to read, as opposed to driving in private cars. The Japanese language, as well – with its compact, meaning-loaded characters and multiple means of writing the same word – is well-suited to the small screen.
It seems fitting that this new form of the novel should originate in the country that gave the world its first, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. There are, in fact, a number of surprising similarities between cell phone novels and their more illustrious ancestor: as well as their shared emphasis on affairs of the heart, both were originally written and distributed as serials, one chapter at a time.
For Classroom Discussion
Jan 14, 2008
Young people talk back on sex ed
Posted by: Judith Donin
More than sixty entries from young people aged 15-30 answered that question, each a one-to-ten minute video that communicates the authors’ experience with sex education and their ideas for how it can be improved.
This contest is a great example of young people taking on authorship of media and using it to express themselves on important issues. You can the top ten entries and vote for your favourite at DoGooder TV until January 16th;; winners will be announced January 22nd.
Nov 28, 2007
Green Screen
Posted by: Warren Nightingale
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) demonstrated that movies could be a powerful force for creating awareness of environmental issues. However, up until recently there has been very little dialogue on the environmental impact of television and film production. Media creation is a big business, dominated by big-budget productions, which generally means a big-footprint on the environment. A 2006 UCLA study of Hollywood found that California’s media industry creates more greenhouse gases than the apparel, hotel, or aerospace industries. For Discussion Ask students what ways the movie industry can help “green” media production? Answers will vary, but may include that the industry can:
Feb 27, 2007
‘Media Labels’ nets top prize in MyMedia student contest
Posted by: Warren Nightingale  Media Awareness Network is pleased to announce the winners of the first MyMedia video podcast contest. The contest was designed to help young people consider ways in which certain members of society are portrayed in the media and how audiences perceive and respond to these representations.
The winning entry “Media Labels” by Skyler LaFreniere, James Dunster and Courtney Stone, of St. Joseph Catholic High School in Ottawa, looks at how young people are labelled and stereotyped in the media. In the video, students’ identities are defined by labels they are forced to wear. Ultimately, one student is able to break free from stereotyping by changing his label.
The second and third place winning entries were created by students Krystyn Eastman and Samantha Tkachyk and Stephanie Johnson from Argyle Alternative High School in Winnipeg.
Congratulations to all winners and finalists of the contest.
Jan 30, 2007
Playback’s list of training programs for media production
Posted by: Warren Nightingale  Playback is a magazine on Canadian film and television production, broadcasting & interactive media. The bi-weekly publication covers industry events, trends and innovations.
The Playback Web site, www.playbackmag.com, offers many resources including a free daily newsletter and a list of training programs in media production. The listing provides detailed information on forty schools/programs available in Canada, including contact information, types of programming and certification, details on facilities, and what’s new to the school or program.
Visit the Playback listing for more information on Canadian training programs.
Jan 10, 2007
Pacific Cinémathèque: Resources for Media Literacy
Posted by: Warren Nightingale  Pacific Cinémathèque is a not-for-profit society dedicated to the understanding of film and moving images. Through exhibitions, film tours, educational services and film-related resources, the Vancouver based organization fosters critical media literacy and advances cinema as an art and as a vital means of communication in British Columbia and Canada.
A great resource for teachers; the organization’s Education Department offers film and media education resources, including student workshops, production programs and InPoint, an online tutorial on digital filmmaking. InPoint covers every phase of production, including fundraising and distribution. The tutorial offers sample video clips, downloadable worksheets and backgrounders for teachers.
Pacific Cinémathèque also offers study guides for films which can be previewed online. Guides for The Grey Fox and The Mighty can be downloaded for free.
For more information on the resources available from Pacific Cinémathèque, visit their Education Department Web site.
|
 MNet News
September 07, 2010
It's over ... and it's complicated. Google Helps Users Learn What it Knows About Them Web Impostors May Face Prison in California A Reprise for Jingles on Madison Avenue Austrian Government Bans “Islamophobic” Political Flash Game Marketing Fanciful Items in the Lands of Make Believe Click here to view MNet News Headlines for the Past Week. 
Recent Blog Entries
Kung fu? In my Karate Kid?
Summer Games Making the case for digital literacy Bending air, race and gender Pop Quiz Search the Blog
Categories
Body Image
(5)
Comics
(3)
Consumerism
(19)
Cyber Bullying
(5)
Environment
(3)
Events
(25)
Human Rights
(8)
Internet
(52)
Media Production
(18)
Movies
(24)
Music
(4)
News
(18)
Online Hate
(3)
Parents
(15)
Privacy
(4)
Resources
(45)
Sports
(5)
Stereotyping
(14)
Television
(17)
Video Games
(10)
Archives
Aug 2010 -
2 entries
Jul 2010 - 5 entries Jun 2010 - 9 entries Apr 2010 - 5 entries Mar 2010 - 7 entries Feb 2010 - 5 entries Jan 2010 - 5 entries Dec 2009 - 14 entries Nov 2009 - 10 entries Oct 2009 - 15 entries Sep 2009 - 1 entries Jul 2009 - 7 entries Jun 2009 - 11 entries May 2009 - 3 entries Apr 2009 - 6 entries Mar 2009 - 5 entries Feb 2009 - 11 entries Jan 2009 - 4 entries Dec 2008 - 7 entries Nov 2008 - 9 entries Oct 2008 - 4 entries Sep 2008 - 11 entries Aug 2008 - 3 entries Jul 2008 - 15 entries Jun 2008 - 2 entries May 2008 - 2 entries Apr 2008 - 13 entries Mar 2008 - 11 entries Feb 2008 - 3 entries Jan 2008 - 8 entries Dec 2007 - 2 entries Nov 2007 - 8 entries Oct 2007 - 2 entries Sep 2007 - 4 entries Aug 2007 - 3 entries Jul 2007 - 4 entries Jun 2007 - 7 entries May 2007 - 3 entries Apr 2007 - 5 entries Mar 2007 - 7 entries Feb 2007 - 18 entries Jan 2007 - 13 entries Dec 2006 - 10 entries Nov 2006 - 15 entries Oct 2006 - 14 entries |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
français | privacy policy | report problems top of page © 2009 Media Awareness Network |
In this special guest blog, MNet intern and University of Ottawa Communications MA candidate Anton van Hamel looks at how a desire to appeal to international audiences may affect a movie's setting and storyline.
the franchise underwent a revamp in 1994 when Daniel was replaced by a new student. The Next Karate Kid, a 1994 sequel, tried to cash in on that decade’s trend towards butt-kicking hero-ines (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, etc.) by casting Hilary Swank in the title role, but failed to either reproduce the original’s success or revive the franchise.
.jpg)
Larry Gonick is a pioneer of non-fiction cartooning; starting with Blood From A Stone: A Cartoon Guide to Tax Reform in 1971, he has made a career out of explaining complicated topics in comic format. In 1978 he published the first issue of The Cartoon History of the Universe as a comic book, starting with the Big Bang and ending with the evolution of humanity. Issues of that series were collected first in 1982 and again in 1990; later two sequels appeared, The Cartoon History of the Universe II and III, and in 2007 the series continued as The Cartoon History of the Modern World. With the second volume of that series, published this fall, Gonick brings his history up to late 2008. Throughout the series Gonick has consistently made history entertaining and approachable as well as accurate (each volume ends with an annotated bibliography) and has shed light on the history of often-neglected parts of the world such as China, India and pre-Columbian America. Among his other works are The Cartoon History of the United States and the Cartoon Guide series, which provide grounding in topics ranging from physics to communication theory to sex; his works have been among the most influential in bringing comics into the classroom. .jpg)
Why do you think cartoons have remained such a popular art form and medium throughout history?
After the controversy surrounding last year's proposed copyright bill C-61, which eventually died on the order table when Parliament was prorogued, the Federal government has decided to hold consultations across Canada before introducing a new version of the bill. While only time will tell how responsive the government will be to the public's submissions, the series of town halls and round tables is definitely a good start in making the process transparent and taking the views of a wide variety of Canadians into account. Below is an expanded version of MNet's submission to the Round Table held in Gatineau, Quebec on July 29th 2009.
