Our final project, “Questionurcommunity.com” is based on the theories in Nessim Watson’s article, “Why We Argue About Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.Net Fan Community.”  Watson’s article investigates and analyzes the debate surrounding the definition of community (i.e. whether an online forum can actually be dubbed a ‘community’), examines how virtual communities function (what is their purpose, how do people use them and why, etc.), and explores the roles of virtual communities within society.  To achieve this, Watson researched the website Phish.com, a forum devoted to the band, Phish, created by its loyal fans.  Watson argues how this forum functions as a community (same hierarchies, same personalities, same problems as a real-life physical community).

          In order to integrate Watson’s theory we originally had an idea to create a melodrama about four co-workers who barely talk to each other at work but then, unbeknownst to them, are actually all members of the same online forum on which they talk to each other daily under pseudonyms.  However, this turned out to be playing on more stereotypical views of online communities (socially challenged people looking to internet to fill that void) instead of reality (regular socially-competent people connecting to other regular socially-competent people about normal interests, hobbies, goals, etc).  We knew we wanted to retain a comical aspect to the video because of our success with that in our last video (Ghost in the English Building).  So we then concentrated on how we could bring out the similarities between online communities and real-world communities (versus the differences that we were highlighting in our initial idea) by using some key elements Watson revealed in online communities and projecting those into a real-life environment.  In order to accomplish this we thought of the idea of casting typical ‘online’ characters (newbie, lurker, troll/spammer, and moderator) as real-life characters in our video.  These character types are present both online and in real life as there is always someone new to the community who doesn’t know the local trends, slang, customs, etc (newbie); someone who sits back and observes everything without contributing anything of their own and is just sort of a background presence (lurker); someone who’s always riling people up, causing fights, soliciting, and just annoying for the sake of annoying (troll/spammer), and someone who feels they should be in charge, makes all the plans, makes sure everyone is on-task or obeying the rules, makes sure everyone is ok and knows what’s going on, etc. (moderator).  We showcased each of these personalities through actions and words: the newbie sat in the wrong seat, didn’t know any of the online speak, always had question; the lurker sat in the back and just took notes without speaking; the troll/spammer was always causing distractions like pop-up adds and always fighting – making fun of the newbie, defying the moderator; and the moderator tried to keep the peace while keeping the group focused and on-track.  The same personalities and hierarchies are present both online and in real-life.  We wanted to illustrate the true similarity between online interaction and real-life interaction – people can and will be the same whether they’re online or not.

          We still needed a more defined way of connecting our film to the article, and so we decided our real-life characters should be students working as a group to define the idea of community and how online communities fit into that definition.  By discussing online communities, it would lead the fictional group to discuss and analyze their own community (group dynamics), which would then serve as a parallel to an analysis of real-life virtual communities and physical (geographical) communities – very Meta!  The group in the film debated whether or not online forums (virtual communities) are the same as geographical communities – the newbie, being very closed-minded and naïve, argues that they are not the same until the moderator brought up the points that they really are the same, just presented differently (coffee-shop analogy).  Our goal was to have the characters themselves personify the debate and come to realize their own erroneous beliefs in order to reveal our message of challenging common misconceptions; the fact is that different people join online communities for different reasons and they all can have different levels of involvement – its not some socially challenged nerd who sits in the dark staring at his/her computer screen laughing to him/herself.  We also addressed issues within communities that occur both online and in real-life including sharing similarities while embracing differences, working together for a common cause, and levels of involvement (everyone is a newbie at some point, the troll needs to chill out, the moderator can’t be a dictator, and the lurker really should contribute at some point).  We also wanted to connect to Watson’s point that these online forums actually accomplish things in real-life and affect people outside of the forum (Phish.net changed the music industry by coming together and creating a new genre of music) by having our fictional group band together for something they all believed in (the assignment was too vague) and work to have it changed.

          As far as the process went, it was really hard for us to come up with inspiration for presenting Watson’s theory in a fun and creative way – we wanted it to be humorous and spoofy like our last film, but that didn’t quite fit with this assignment.  We also had filming issues in that we had 4 characters and 4 group members and a lot of our scenes required all of us to be in the shot (so no camera-operator).  But after viewing long segments of the single-angle tripod camera setup of us sitting and talking, we realized how boring that was, so we decided we needed different camera angles to spice it up and make it more visually interesting.  After watching a mini “Scrubs’ marathon the night before, I thought it would be a good idea to have these thought-bubble segments in which the characters’ internal thoughts would be displayed on-screen (like JD does ALL the time on Scrubs).  We wanted to incorporate the on-line experience in these and so we decided to make them like hyper-links (blue underlined font headlines to click on).  Unfortunately due to our semi-limited knowledge of IMovie and film-editing, I’m not sure all of our ideas got across.  I think the class would all have to be members of online communities (or at least to have all read Watson’s article) to understand all the things we were talking about and for them to be funny.  I know I personally had no clue what a troll, lurker, or moderator was and had never heard of things like a “rick roll” – so I’m sure some of the class was in the same boat as me and didn’t really get all of our allusions.  I think a lot of the projects in this class depended on a trial-and-error method – you don’t know exactly what you’re final product is going to be when you start the project, and many factors (inspiration/motivation, knowledge of the tools required, technological issues, group dynamics, group schedules, material/footage accumulated, etc.) can all influence the direction the project takes, the shifting of ideas to fit that direction, and what the actual finished product turns out to be. 

           For our video project, my group started out by just tossing around different ideas of what we wanted to do; we knew we wanted to do something funny or some type of parody, and so somehow we came upon the idea of paranormal investigations.  As it so happened, there was a paranormal investigator, Patrick Burns, from True TV/Court TV’s “Haunting Evidence” coming to that week’s Illinites in the Union and giving a speech followed by an actual paranormal investigation of the English Building.  And so we thought it would be perfect to go and film the experience to see if we could use some of the footage.  Well as it turned out it wasn’t as exciting as we had hoped and it turned out to be mainly just him talking about himself, his experiences with paranormal activity, and the science/profession of paranormal investigation (boring!).  Even the paranormal investigation (advertised as a ghost hunt) was a bust, because he forgot much of his equipment and ended up just talking and answering questions.  So then we came up with the idea of ourselves being the team of paranormal investigators, but sort of in a ‘mocumentary’ way, and we would investigate the semi-notorious haunting of the English Building by a girl who drowned in the basement pool back when it was a women’s dormitory.  We watched some episodes of “Haunting Evidence” in order to get a feel for how the show transpires and found that the characters actually take it very seriously and have very dramatic moments during the show (perfect to parody!) We thought it would be really funny for us to pose as being really serious and invested in the investigation but to show others’ reactions to the ‘ghost’ as far less concerned.  We accomplished this by using interviews of people in the English building (students, professors, secretaries, etc.).  We established roles for ourselves based on the roles of the characters in “Haunting Evidence” with myself being the psychic, Yolanda being the paranormal investigator, Chris being the ‘medium’ (someone who can feel the channeling of spirits) and Caroline as our trusty camera woman. 

          As far as filming the footage, we didn’t have a set-plan except for filming certain ‘creepy-looking’ hallways, classrooms, etc. in the English building and parodying some of the footage we witnessed on “Haunting Evidence” and in Patrick’s presentation.  We filmed the “team” going around the English Building basement hallways (which were very old and eerie), and upper floors (also very creepy when vacant).  The scene where Chris feels a “hot spot” (and then we look down with the camera and he’s standing next to a heater) was inspired by an episode of “Haunting Evidence” when the medium sensed what he felt to be “cold spots” and “hot spots” – but it made it ten times funnier (and more mocking) to have that be from a heater rather than a spirit!  Another parody scene is the one in which Yolanda is all by herself ‘waiting’ for her fellow-team members to come (when really we were in the background making noises and shadows) – this came from a clip Patrick showed us of him in the same situation, waiting for his fellow investigation crew on the haunted ship, The Queen Elizabeth, during which he filmed himself “Blair Witch” style (hand-held shaky camera seeing what he’s seeing and occasionally turning back on himself) while hearing paranormal noises (which sounded to us like nothing more than echoes).  Nonetheless, he was freaking out, so we thought it would be fun to parody with our own version (shadows of us walking in front of a projector screen, hand-shadows, headphone-shadows, etc – just really random, really amateur, and really funny!).  Some times, however, we weren’t making the “paranormal activity” up… like the scene in which the door to the supply closet opened by itself (which we made funny by inventing a bizarre instrument with a ridiculous name to measure the present surrounding paranormal activity), and also the part where Chris closes the doors and the window above him magically closes on its own! – this turned out to be something with the air pressure because they were able to recreate it, but it was still a really cool effect!  Other than that we filmed random shots of different things (stairs, windows, a drinking fountain to represent the theme of water and drowning – a joke of course – etc.).  We also filmed shots of the outside of the English building and the atrium where the pool used to be which we then spliced with old pictures we found online of the English Building when it was first built (then, the Women’s Building) and an old picture of a young woman from the 1900s who we characterized as “Abigail” the notorious girl who drowned in the basement pool and now haunts the English building.  After that we filmed interviews of students, professors, and the secretary from the English building, asking them if they had heard of the ghost of the English Building, if they had seen any paranormal activity in the English Building, and if they were concerned about it.  We expected most to either not have heard of it (which was good, because here we are all serious about it and no one has heard of it), or to not be concerned about it (also good)… we definitely got what we were looking for!

          As far as the editing process, it was probably the hardest part (or at least the most time-consuming) just deciding what parts to include, what parts to cut/shorten, and what order to put everything in, plus add the voice-over and put that all together in the film program.  Luckily two of my group members were very familiar with IMovie and the whole film editing process (something I myself have never done!).  We made our outline from the footage we filmed, putting the background story first, then an “opening sequence” for our character roles, then footage from our exploration of the English Building, spliced in with interviews of people, followed by more exploration, more interviews, and Yolanda’s solo scare.  We struggled with trying to find a good place for the Patrick Burns footage (we had originally thought of saying we needed aid from a professional and we got Patrick) and, much to our dismay (for we had invested so much time going to his lecture/tour and now it was for nothing), we decided not to include it (also for time reasons because we were at like over 7 min.).  But other than that the editing went fairly smoothly and we got it uploaded and it turned out to be really really funny!  We had a lot of fun making it and I hope it shows in the film (I think it does!)  Enjoy J

1)      How can what is shot (film-wise) influence the message of the film? (think of the difference between Hampe’s idea in shooting ‘Miss Darling’ and the cameraman’s actual footage)

2)      How can a director mediate between what he/she wants to convey in a film and the footage that he/she actually films? Can a director plan out what he/she films in order to capture what he/she wants to convey in the film, or does he/she have to simply film and edit the footage to fit the theme? One cannot make events occur that go along with one’s ideas, but one cannot edit one’s ideas into something that is not there.

3)      Hampe places extreme importance on the visual elements of a documentary (as opposed to audio) – how does this fit in with Bolter’s views on hypermediation and Shipka’s views on the importance of audio?

1)      How can writing in group collaboration be helpful? How can it be a hindrance?

2)      Why would a single-authored text sell better than a multi-authored text? What is the social stigma on collaborative efforts in regards to producing original material? Where has it come from?

3)      What is the difference between collaborating and adapting?

1)      How do Bolter’s definitions of mediation, hypermediation, and remediation interact/intersect? Do they compliment each other (work together) or challenge each other (contest independently)?

2)      According to Bolter, how can we achieve transparent mediacy, or “achieve the real”?  Can hypermediacy lead to a more realistic experience, or would being bombarded with media take away from a realistic experience?

3)      What is the point of achieving transparent mediacy? If the person using the media knows that it is media (i.e. knows he/she is playing a life-simulating video game that is not actual reality) then why the push for complete realism? If a person is sitting at a computer or needs to put special goggles on to experience virtual reality then wouldn’t he/she know it is not real life? Can a person ever escape the media he/she is using while using that specific media?

            For my audio project, I wanted to demonstrate just how easily we change moods and how the littlest things can make or break our days. I wanted to focus mainly on sounds (versus dialogue) to convey the message, in order to demonstrate how we don’t always need other cues (visual, speech, etc.) to get the meaning across – we understand situations based solely on their recognizable sounds (due to the fact that we hear them every day).  I got the idea by thinking of all the little sounds we hear in the background everyday and that we ignore and never notice – but that would really be missed if all the sudden they ceased.  Like Heidi McKee observes in her essay, we live immersed in sounds… we cannot get away from sound… sound is integral to our world.  I mostly used sound effects that I downloaded off the internet as sounds clips, but I also used two songs to set the mood of the piece (one semi-melancholy and one pumped-up), as well as dialogue I recorded on a microphone.  In this way I incorporated a type of ‘multimodal soundness,’ as Jody Shipka would call it, including different types of sounds (sounds produced on purpose, like vocal expressions and music, and sounds produced as an accident or the simple effect of motion, like footsteps, rain, rustling, blinds opening, doors opening/closing, etc.  I wanted to involve both sounds we think about and sounds we don’t.

The hardest part of the project was definitely the editing process. Although Audacity is a fairly simple program to use, I had no experience with it at all but still included many different tracks due to all the sounds I wanted to use and that made things a little difficult (like timing, getting everything to be in sync and play at the right times so they made sense, editing the loudness of certain sounds so they didn’t interfere with other sounds playing at the same time, emphasizing certain sounds over others to bring focus to what is going on, etc). I also had many technological problems with my computer (it couldn’t handle the process and was going extremely slow and skipping, making sound-editing impossible).  So then I transferred my project onto another computer, during which some of the files were corrupted (some of the tracks would not play at all, others only half the track would play, etc.)  Because I’m not very technologically experienced, this was extremely frustrating and disheartening because I had no clue what to do or how to fix the problem.  Not being able to fix the corrupted files, I had to re-input/import all the files that had been corrupted and were not working (about half the tracks) and then re-work them into my project (re-edit them, re-align them, re-time them, re-do everything) which took FOREVER!  It was very discouraging, and I probably made the project way more complicated than it needed to be by including so many short little tracks; however I really liked the idea so I stuck with it.  Luckily I got it to work (except for posting it onto my blog because I had never used net-files before so I didn’t know how to do that) and it all sounds pretty good and very cohesive.  I wish I knew more about how to use Audacity so I could play with the sounds more (amplify, soften, make better cuts/repeats, etc) so the project would be more polished, but since I’m a beginner I think it turned out rather well J Before when the project wasn’t working I created a script and posted it to let readers know what it was supposed to sound like, I think I’ll leave that up just as a visual reference to the sound that you are know (finally – thank God!) hearing!

The Script: (asterisk indicates sound) 

It starts off with the sound of *snoring* and then an *alarm clock* going off, the sound of the guy *hitting* the alarm to turn it off, more *snoring*, with the *alarm* going off a second time, another *hit* to turn it off, a *groan* as he struggles to *get up*, the sound of *blinds opening* and the immediate clap of *thunder* sounding off a *rainstorm* (which continues in the background for awhile), the guy *sighs* again, *brushes his teeth*, fumbles around his room/apartment (*papers rustling*), says “ugh, where’s my umbrella?!”, more *rustling*, then “ugh, I’m gonna be late!”, sound of *paper gathering*, jacket *zipping*, the door *slamming*, then a *melancholy song* starts (*intro to Title and Registration* by Deathcab for Cutie) the song plays on while *footsteps* walking in mud start up and the thunder&rain continue on. This continues until the sound of a door *opening* (at this point the storm sounds and footsteps cease but the song continues on quietly). Now you hear a *crowd talking* (other students in the classroom), and then the teacher announces “pop quiz!” (the song stops). All the students *groan* and the sound of *pencil’s writing* begins with intermittent sounds of *erasing*, *pencil tapping*, and *coughing* until the bell *rings* and the *song* starts up again, as well as the *thunderstorm* until the *thunderstorm fades out* and we hear *birds chirping* (to represent the sun coming out) the guy (to himself) says “huh” and then the sound of girls *giggling* after which the guy (in his head) says “ooh, did that girl just smile at me??” and then we hear the girls (distant whisper) say “did you see that guy?” “yeah, he was cute!”, and then an *upbeat song* starts playing (Chemical Brothers’ *Galvanize*) till fade.

Since I have re-done everything you can now click on the link to hear the final project in all its auditory glory!

1)   Hampe stresses the importance of using still photographs in documentaries; what kind of effect do still photos have versus video-recorded footage? Is using still photographs more “moving” than using real-time footage? Why?

2)  Hampe also stresses the importance of having a direction in mind while planning and before starting a documentary, but how can this direction influence the validity of the film? What if the director’s direction includes the director’s bias (ever seen a Michael Moore film??). How can one combat the ever-present problem of biases? Or is biased opinions part of the directing/editing process (i.e. what shapes the film and forms its final presentation)?

3)  Even though nowadays we have a multitude of “reality” shows, the question arises as to how realistic they really are, given the editing process and demand for entertainment value that is placed on them.  For example, person A is badmouthing person C to person B.  The camera will shoot back-and-forth between persons A&B talking and person C, as if they are only a room apart and person C could easily walk into the next room and hear the insults… and then when person C does get up and enter the room that persons A&B are in, luckily they have just finished their talk and did not get caught by person C (but it was super close to becoming a huge fight – drama!). However, in reality, these two shots are filmed on completely different days or different times, and are just pasted together by the editing crew to create drama/entertainment. So if that isn’t how it really happened, how can the show be dubbed “reality”? Does the same thing happen in other types of documentaries (like historical?).  If the documentary has to have a “point of view,” as Hampe says on page 5, and we can’t let the footage speak for itself, how do we, the audience, know we are getting the truth?

1)      Why have what Bishop calls “linear print-based academic essays” (359) become the norm for expressing scholarly ideas? How can multimodal compositions benefit and surpass the standard textual essay? Would using more than one type of media be distracting to the content or would it add to it?

2)      Shipka’s recollection of her student, Dan’s, ‘forced’ creativity because his printer didn’t work well enough to produce a legible CD jacket and so by compensating with a ‘press-package-like’ textual copy, he actually made it seem more legitimate/realistic reminded me of my own process with our last project (the sequential art project): because of constraints put upon me by the technological medium I was working with, I had to alter my project (making the three collages of pictures instead of one long string of pics), which ultimately ended up working better because then the common parallel between the three stages could be seen more easily (as discussed in class upon the review of my production). This brings me to my question – which is more productive and/or beneficial for creativity, placing constraints/obstacles that one must think of a way to get around, or, having something completely open (with no obstacles) but also no direction?

3)      When sound isn’t necessary (as it was in Dan’s band project and Val’s museum project) how can it be integrated into a project as background, but still affect the audience? (i.e. set the mood, set the tone, emphasize certain points, etc.)  Essentially, even if sound isn’t necessary, how can it still be effective?

1)  Reading McKee’s opening which discusses how we are completely and constantly surrounded by sound reminds me of an episode of MTV’s “True Life” I saw recently in which it followed the lives of 2 deaf teens. One of the teens got a cochlear implant which enabled him to hear. Right after getting the implant he was amazed at all the sounds he was hearing for the first time like the sound of the wind blowing, the crunch of fallen leaves under his feet, etc. It made me think – how would our world be different if sound was muted? What if we could only hear what we were focusing on and not any background noise? How would that impact our daily lives?

2)  How can sound benefit visual media (i.e. text and/or picture)? Can sound hinder it (i.e. distract from it)? What is key to maintaining that balance?  What if sound replaces the visual (books on tape/cd)? Or visual replaces sound (closed captioning)? Is the total package lost with either of these two examples?

3)  When films first appeared there was no sound, but now we have movies with spoken dialogue, sound effects, and soundtracks to go along with the visual. What if we went back to silent movies? What effect would the silence bring to the film?

        For my sequential art project, I continued on with the theme of nature, focusing this time on the cycle of nature’s growth, destruction by man, and subsequent regrowth.  I entitled it “Nature’s Revenge.”  I first got the idea by thinking of a plant’s growth process as sequential and able to be documented in photographic sequence, and then I added the idea of man’s destruction of nature and nature’s triumph over man to give it a message (i.e. nature always finds a way to prevail).

            At first I started out with the simple idea of having pictures of a plant growing, a tree, a person cutting down a tree, an urban setting, a plant growing in the crack of a sidewalk, ivy on a house, and then the Asian vine, kudzu, which grows to cover everything.  When I started looking for pictures online (I didn’t have any personal pictures of any of these except the kudzu and didn’t think I’d be able to find all of them locally so I decided to get them all online via Google Image), I gradually kept expanding on my idea until I winded up with 28 pictures total for my sequential photo essay!  I thought my initial idea might be too separated and disjointed so I included more photos to illustrate the entire long growth process from a plant budding to a tree-filled forest covering vast hillsides, the snowballing destruction process in which one house in the forest leads to cutting down some trees which leads to multiple houses and multiple tree demolition to highways and cities taking over and the forest completely obsolete, and finally the prevailing rebuilding process that stems from a single bud in the cracks of a sidewalk to the total take-over of whole houses and all surroundings.

            In regards to presentation, I had a few issues because of how many photos I ended up including in my photo essay… initially I had planned to group the photos into a horizontal panoramic collage.  However I couldn’t fit them all into one, so then I decided to separate them into three horizontal panoramic collages: one displaying the plant’s growth spanning from a picture of the plant’s initial growth to a picture of the tree-covered hills, one displaying man’s destruction of nature spanning from a single house in the woods to a cityscape with no plant life visible, and one displaying nature’s regrowth and ‘revenge’ spanning from a single plant growing in a sidewalk crack to kudzu spreading over everything in sight.  These also proved to be not the best option as the entire collage wouldn’t fit on my webpage so the viewer would have to click on the image to see all the photos, taking them to a different webpage and making the images quite small and hard to see.  This made the flow still seem disjointed since there were three separate collages of pictures and each one had to be viewed separately, thus not connecting the entire message (more like seeing the separate stages to the process).  So then I made the collages vertical (so they could span down the page and be seen all at once).  Of course they are still too long and the viewer must scroll down the page to see all the pictures, but there’s not much else I can think to do, unless I group them into smaller horizontal collages (like 3 pics each) or if I printed all the pictures out and put them on a piece of paper and then took a picture of that!  This process really made me realize how presentation can affect the message – grouping certain items/images together influences the way the viewer perceives/interprets the images, connecting some and disconnecting others.  It also made me realize the limitations of mediums (i.e. a computer screen) – if I had these images printed out and able to physically put them wherever/however I wanted to, I might be able to express what I had in mind more easily; instead it is displayed on a website on a computer screen, which has its visual limitations (either the pictures are too small – thumbnail size, or too big to fit on the screen so the viewer needs to scroll, not seeing the whole thing at once).  So, although the presentation isn’t ideal, I hope the message still gets across!

image sources:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Small_cannabis_plant_growing.jpg2)   http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1586484/posts

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http://warnell.forestry.uga.edu/warnell/kahrs/i/MaritimeForest3.jpg

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http://flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/359943069/

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http://picasaweb.google.com/anika.green/Cruising2007#5156971897486547586

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http://flickr.com/photos/83955435@N00/113925975/

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http://www.greengeek.ca/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/kudzu.jpg