Get The Message?

There's this visual novel that I've been obsessed with for about a year now. Katawa Shoujo is a choose your own adventure story that takes you through relationships in the character's senior year of high school. From that description it sounds like it would be a sappy collection of brooding, teen romance novels. What makes the game fantastic is the dialogue is well written and crafts gripping stories. There are five major story arcs and each of them are worthwhile, because they avoid the obvious.

I tried looking at each story based on its events to determine the emotional arc the story creates for the characters, but this varied among the stories and was often times deconstructing romance stories that are cliché's. The single aspect that is unchanged in all of the stories is that you can only reach the "good ending" once you make decisions that cause the character to think of themselves. If you try to "get the girl" by "being the hero" you end up screwing around with the character's feelings and things fall apart as the characters lose touch with each other. I thought that was a stroke of genius to force the player to realize that you can only truly support someone else by having the courage to make your own feelings clear.

I think that's why stories like "Twilight" bother me so much. They only focus on the events that "bring" people together and forget to emphasize the aspects of the characters that "keep" them together. You can't have two characters who support each other simply because they have the other person. A person can only be there for another once they have some level of personal satisfaction. You can't see what someone really needs until you can take yourself out of equation and know that you already have your own security intact.

Letting Go

My senior film has been a nightmare in numerous ways. Mainly because I indulge too heavily in torturing myself. I entered into this project setting out to make THE FILM. I wanted to make my masterpiece, my Fantasia. Now that it's falling short of expectations, I consistently do this thing where I spiral downward into total depression over the slightest details. I can never seem to build myself up on my own, but all it takes is for someone else to say, "dude, what are you worried about? You'll make other films."

I don't like the thought of slugging through a film just to get to the next one, but there's a lot of truth in their advice. We make films so the next will always be better. It's also the strangest thing. This semester I've kind of blown off most of my electives, but I'm making more "A's" than usual. Maybe the secret of life is to give less of a shit?

An Appreciation of Time

30 seconds sounds like a lot of time for a commercial, just like how 500 words like a lot of time to tell a story. In thirty seconds, my goal was to introduce a new innovation to the world of fast food advertising and show the benefits of this approach. My commercial tells the story of a man who sees what he wants advertised on a bilboard. The twist is that a headgear accessories in the future will incorporate technology that can identify attention patterns in human thought. The device allows companies to send you personalized savings coupons based on your individual tastes.

If I gained anything from the mess I came up with, it's the experience of finding out what can be cut and to simplify an idea.

Link To Clip: https://vimeo.com/54511559

Here are a few of the Style Sheets for the shots that had to be cut

The design is happily the only thing I can say I'm proud of from this train wreck.

Propaganda Power

I was surprised to find how much some people's ideas had changed for their propaganda posters. I greatly enjoyed a lot of the designs we saw two weeks ago, and was saddened to see that many had been edited down so heavily. Admittedly, my early concepts were hastily assembled, but the idea was there. I had my direction and any changes were to clarify the message and make the picture more visually interesting. After seeing how dramatically some ideas had changed, I felt like many messages became shy or feared standing out as dramatically as before.

Propaganda is supposed to be daring and push the envelope. If it comes off as extreme, that can be a strength when handled correctly. I proposed a tagging stencil for graffiti-based propaganda. That's an art form that is illegal! It's effective because it deals directly with the notion of controlling how art should be distributed and viewed. Graffiti images are largely designed to gain perceived power through mass distribution. The image by itself isn't a masterpiece, but it gains value by dominating a space and immersing the audience in a simple message.

Thanksgiving Break

Over the break, I expected to be bombarded with advertisements pertaining to the current holiday at hand, Thanksgiving. Much to my surprise I didn't see a single commercial pertaining to food or how to provide the perfect family setting. All ads were hellbent on convincing me to attend the Black Friday shopping events. I only go if there's something specific on sale that I know a family member or close friend would like to receive as a gift. The exception this year is that a friend invited me to come along as they shopped for a deal at Best Buy. Knowing my sister would enjoy a decent pair of headphones, I accepted the invitation.

The biggest let down of the "Black Friday Sales" was that nothing was actually on sale. Once in the store, I made my way through the crowds towards the sale event signs and was disappointed by what I found. Each set of headphones was listed at $20-30 below the regular sale price, but Best Buy always offers those prices because they're exclusively an electronics wholesale store. By listing the retail price they create the illusion that you're saving money, but their prices were no different than usual.

Nostalgia Goggles

We were discussing about how people romanticize things of the past to be much better than they actually were. I'm well aware that my "nostalgia goggles" are the thickest rose tinted lenses around, but I like to believe I have credible reasons for loving the things I do. Video games serve as a good example of how newer isn't always better. 2D sprite animated gameplay obviously lacks any true grasp of realism, and so it engaged players through story, gameplay, and theming. When a well made game, in terms of the playable experience, is visually lacking it requires the players to bridge the gap through imagination. Where a character onscreen may simply execute its basic slash animation, a player knows the experience is artificial and imagines what kind of dynamic attack their hero would use.

This is an experience ultimately lost in the world of three dimensional graphics. The artificial reality tries its hardest to appear believable, but characters are still programmed with set patterns of movement. Video games no make such an effort to look real, but cannot fully succeed. Since games no longer have the stronger visual disassociation that sprite games did, the experience doesn't bring me to a place where I openly accept the games obviously artificial world. This makes digital movement programmed patterns stand out more glaringly. What happened to letting a player's imagination do some of the work? I'm no longer experiencing the immersion on my own terms.

SKYFALL Rises!

Yesterday, I entered the theatre filled with anticipation, but keeping an open mind. I am very pleased to say that Sam Mendes' "SKYFALL" is a triumph! By far, the best movie I have seen this year. I would put this film up against "The Dark Knight Rises" & "Paranorman" and say that "SKYFALL" trumps them all. Mendes' bond is not formulaic in the slightest of ways. While it remains faithful to the franchise, it does not rely on any of the "old tricks". The film strongly addresses multiple points about Bond's character and seamlessly ties them together to make a story that treats all the characters with dignity. There are no throwaway moments in Mendes' masterpiece. His camerawork flawlessly puts the audience into this unique world he has created, and subtly reveals clues that all come together to form meaningful moments of small revelations leading to the climax of the film. Mendes' has not only raised the bar for Bond films, but has redefined action movies by doing the most by using less. At no point did I feel an element of his filming was overused. His camerawork is modest when necessary, but always carried a flare of genius as it lead into a telling moment.

The IMDB review I read a few days earlier has no credibility. Javier Bardem's performance was remarkable, and he was working with an equally remarkable script. The villain avoids being this plucky madman who simply wants to "rule the world or watch it burn". While there are moments that his character is humorous, his motivations are specific. It is important to have some lighthearted moments with your villains, because when executed properly then can disarm the audience and make the character unsettlingly threatening. Sam Mendes is a master of playing with an audience's expectations and Skyfall does precisely that. The review was grossly underselling the film, and it is no surprise that I can no longer find the article.

SKYFALL or SKYFAIL?

On October 26, "Skyfall: 007" was released in European theaters. The theatrical release for USA is November 9. I've been reading some reviews for this film, and largely the criticism it receives it that MGM is trying too hard to mimic the style and success of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" series. Many fear that the reinventing of Bond that has taken place since casting Daniel Craig has broken too far from the more satirical roots of the series and is trying to establish a sense of realism that does not fit well with the sensational stunts that are consistently in Bond movies.

While I am not unaware that darker, grittier styles have grown vastly more popular after Nolan's success with the "Batman" series, those movies did not at all attempt any form of realism. This realism that critics claim the Bond movies are reaching for is something that I feel is purely an invention of opinionated writers. The sensationalism of Bond movies has largely been what decides wether an audience loves or hates the series as a whole. I'm not going to get into what defines "The Bond Universe" because that's an issue purely for fans of the series. Bond is a character that demands a suspension of disbelief, and that is maintained not by throwing around sex and explosions but by staying faithful to the character you are setting out to create.

Christopher Nolan's Batman certainly broke away from the goofy, more humorous, counterparts of the past. It didn't aim for any sense of realism. The world became more relatable to ours by focusing on the forces that drive the characters and how they grapple with forces beyond their control. Any sense of realism we gain as an audience is because we are shifting how we view heroes and seeing more of ourselves in the story. We are seeing heroes bleed, fall, and rise more because the characters are now becoming the centerpiece, and the stunts are more in service to the style and the fantasy. I'll have to see the movie this Friday to look for this "realism" the new director is searching for, and see if the reviews I read hold water or if they were just trying to be juicier read throughs.

The Wrong Kind Of Attention

There's moments where you stop and think, "Who could've thought that was a good idea?" This is a photograph I managed to take at a stoplight of a local convenience store. I've always assumed that people have a basic level of common sense that causes them to stop and think before putting something up on a wall or bilboard. I was wrong. Of all the vowels that had to replace "e" to keep the sign from reading "Negro's" they had to select the one letter that makes the name of the store look like an even more offensive word.
I'd like to believe we live in a world where this kind of thing doesn't matter, but that's not the reality. Words carry content, and the subject dealt with here is a weighty topic. If anything this serves as an example of why it is important to proofread your work.

Getting Attention

Walking along the streets of Kansas City on Halloween has its benefits. The heightened awareness of my surroundings, mainly watching out for the crazies, brought this sign to my attention.

In my case, all it takes is for an ad to be clever. I immediately wanted to know more, because I felt there was some information I was lacking. It was like there was some bigger joke i didn't want to be left out of. The sign ended up being an ad for a local law firm.
I am seeing a growing popularity in ads adapting to this idea that all it takes is to get noticed. Just maybe someone will share this on their popular tumblr, then the ad will be seen by all of their dedicated followers. It's fascinating how advertising has developed around this idea that you just have to be memorable. If it gets people's attention, regardless of wether it is good, then it has achieved its purpose.
This is definitely what drives a lot of propaganda. The message is often hard to grasp and poorly constructed, but all that is needed is for the message to spread and it will eventually sink in by playing on people's fears or expectations.