Sians Blog 14/05/08

Today we watched a film called Tron made in 1982, about a hacker/arcade owner Kevin Flynn who is digitally broken down into a data stream by a villainous software pirate known as the Master Control and reconstituted into the internal, 3-D graphical world of computers. It is there, in cyberspace, that Flynn joins forces with Tron to outmaneuver the Master Control program that holds them captive in the equivalent of a gigantic, infinitely challenging computer game.
A hacker is split into molecules and is transported into a computer. In this computer a mean program called Master Control behaves like a dictator. The hacker, who programmed a number of features of the environment he got into, teams up with a book keeping program and his girl-friend and together they try to replace Master Control with Tron. Tron is an honest safety system.
Kevin Flynn is a former employee of the software corporation Encom, now running a arcade. Flynn has been trying to hack into Encom's mainframe computer to find evidence that Encom's senior executive Ed Dillinger stole four video games he created.

Sians Blog 07/05/08

Today we watched a film called Koyaanisqatsi, The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning 'crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living.' Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is based on a collision of two different worlds, urban life and technology versus the environment, the music was composed by Philip Glass. The film isnt so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value, it stimulates the viewer to insert their own meaning. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and natural landscapes across the United States. The film starts with an ariel shot of the choppy sea and rows of flowers followed by interperating mans involvement in the enviroment, with shots of a mining truck causing tonnes of toxic smoke into the air, power plants and mining.
The film contains several sequences with recurring musical themes, the chapters on each sequal are seperated and named by the titles of the musical sections:

• Organic
• Resource
• Vessels
• Cloudscape
• Pruit-Igoe
• Slow people
• The Grid
• Microchips
• Prophecies
• Ending

This film made me think about the ways in which i am going to present the words from the four groups of words we were given. I am thinking about using different videos and stitching them together like the koyaanisqatsi film, and also adding text and sound. x

Sians Blog 06/05/08

I have been researching different ways of combining sound and images,
and have found a website that i find interesting:
http://www.thedesignersrepublic.com
I like the use of the moving text and imagery, as the mouse is scrolled over the text it moves, sometimes changes and makes a different sound, while the image flashes from image to image showing different types of text, reflected or lit up on buildings.
I have thought about using the flashing use of imagery and incorporating text and sound into it. x