Archive for January, 2008
A Day in the Life: Using the Music - a Dead Zone vid by Shalott and Speranza
Jacqueline Kjono, Independent Scholar/Vidder — January 30th, 2008|
One of the challenges vidders face is finding a song with lyrics that work for the character and acquiring the technical expertise to cut to the beat. The best vids go beyond that. “A Day in the Life” illustrates many other elements of the music through the clip, transition and effect choices.
The source footage comes from “The Dead Zone,” a series about a man named John Smith who has visions triggered by touching someone or something. The stream of consciousness reverie of the lyrics [...]
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“Not Only Human” - an X-Files vid by Killa and Laura Shapiro
Tisha Turk, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota, Morris — January 29th, 2008|
One of the most common subgenres of vid is the character study, in which vidders illuminate characters’ emotions or motivations, revel in their charms or foibles, or simply distill the essence of their appeal. Most character studies have a strong persuasive component: the vidder argues for particular interpretations of characters and their places within source texts—interpretations that may align with a show’s canon, revise that canon, or even contradict it.
In “Not Only Human,” Lau [...]
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“Pressure” - a metavid by the California Crew
Francesca Coppa, Director of Film Studies, Muhlenberg College. — January 28th, 2008|
Vidding is a form of grass-roots filmmaking in which footage, most frequently from television shows or movies, is edited to music. The resulting vids comment on, critique, or otherwise interpret the filmic source. An art form practiced primarily by women, vidding long predates today's YouTube culture; Kandy Fong made vids with slides in the late 1970s, and until quite recently, vids were made using two VCRs, one for playing footage and one for recording it.
This process was quite arduous: th [...]
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Ornament and Crime: Figuring out Space in Damages.
Melissa Hardie, University of Sydney — January 25th, 2008|
Ellen Parson’s position as an attorney at Hewes and Associates promises aesthetic regeneration as career advancement. Her new job comes with a new wardrobe and, later, a new apartment. After a threatening incident Hewes and her employees decamp to Hewes’ voluminous apartment; Ellen’s apartment is always an extension of Hewes and Associates’ corporate space. Interior space is conspicuously large and largely empty. Personal spaces are territorialized by work demands; demarcations betwe [...]
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No Future?/Fight the Future!: Terminator4 (Sarah Connor Chronicles) and Virtual Communities of Resistance
Christian Erickson, Roosevelt University — January 24th, 2008|
In the clip you just saw the stakes of the future war between humans and cybernetic organisms is laid out in stark detail. Given that the current T4 or fourth generation of the “Terminator” series of works is a serialized televisual work the potential audience for this epic narrative of a existential struggle between species over the telos of the future is both global is range and micropolitical in the most intimate of relations (a theme commented on in my previous IMR piece regarding “int [...]
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“Just One Catch”: Wild on the CW
Cynthia Chris, Assistant Professor, Department of Media Culture, College of Staten Island/CUNY — January 23rd, 2008|
Life Is Wild premiered last fall as The CW’s reversioning of iTV’s Wild at Heart. As its successful British predecessor enters its third season, Life Is Wild stumbles in the ratings basement, despite endorsement from the Parents’ Television Council. The premise is equal parts Daktari and Dawson’s Creek. A New York couple — he’s a vet, she’s a lawyer, played by D.W. Moffett and Stephanie Niznik— relocate to South Africa to run a guest lodge. Their children are conveniently teenage [...]
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Be-Be-Beaver Boys!
Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University — January 22nd, 2008|
Ever since Andy Kaufman performed his notorious “Mighty Mouse” routine on the first episode of Saturday Night Live, avant-comedy has relentlessly pursued a terminal aesthetic of sophisticated incompetence. How to be funny by being unfunny? How to signify that you’re in on the joke by being oblivious to the joke? This gets harder with each generation, of course, as strategies for staging comedic incompetence become more abstract and amplified. “Beaver Boys” is a segment from Tim and [...]
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“Exploited in a very ugly way”: Iraq war refugees in Syria
Cynthia Fuchs, Director, Film & Media Studies, George Mason University — January 21st, 2008|
The story of displaced, kidnapped, and deceived Iraqi girls and young women now working in the Syrian sex industry is surely disturbing. Aside from raising awareness, the YouTube placement raises several issues. One, as several YouTube links reveal, the basic story has been reported not only the tireless Journeyman Pictures, but also by U.S. television networks, NBC and CBS. All three reports follow a basic structure: "anonymous" figures appear dancing, shadowed, blurred, and framed as "exotic," [...]
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Shirley, You Can’t Be Serious: David Zucker’s Praxis of Evil
Viveca Greene, Hampshire College — January 18th, 2008|
In October 2006, shortly after North Korea tested its long-range missiles, David Zucker of Airplane! and Scary Movie 3 and 4 fame released this political ad; he created it for the RNC, but the party deemed it "too hot" to officially endorse. The press, though, paid attention, and YouTube reports nearly a million views of the piece. Conjuring another highly controversial ad—LBJ’s apocalyptic 1964 "Daisy"—Zucker’s postmodern inversion stridently declaims that unless America votes Republica [...]
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“Bricks” - a Supernatural vid by Luminosity
Louisa Stein, San Diego State University — January 31st, 2008