Gossip Girl

One show I have recently begun binge watching on Netflix is Gossip Girl. The story focuses on a group of privileged teens, Blair Waldorf, Serena van der Woodsen, Nate Archibald, Chuck Bass and Dan Humphrey, living on the Upper Eastside of New York City. The show is narrated by Gossip Girl, a ruthless and mysterious blogger who reveals the teen's deepest secrets. The television series is based on the book series of the same name written by Cecily von Ziegesar.

The series began with the return of Upper East Side "It Girl" Serena van der Woodsen, after a long, mysterious stay at a boarding school in Cornwall, Connecticut. It is revealed that she has had a scandalous past that continues to haunt her throughout the show and she is notorious for her many on-again, off-again relationships with countless male characters as well as for her rebellious drive-outs. Blair Waldorf, who is described as the queen at the center of the chess game, is a longtime friend and occasional rival of Serena's, and the queen bee of Constance Billard School's social scene. The story also follows Chuck Bass, who serves as the show's antihero, being a womanizer and party lover with a troubled life and past that provide a hidden vulnerable side, and “Golden Boy" Nate Archibald, always being fought over by the prominent female characters, and deals with a lot of issues that compromise his "perfect" life. Gossip Girl ran for 6 seasons before they producers decided to end the show with the reveal of who Gossip Girl really was.

One of the things I found most interesting about the show was their advertising methods. The show was notorious for it's mixed reviews, but after receiving horrible criticism from a couple different sources for it's risqué content, they decided to take those reviews and use them as part of an advertising campaign. I found this entirely innovative and to be an interesting twist on typical advertising methods.

Tumblr and How it is Ruining Movies

The first time my friend showed me her Tumblr, went like this:

Me: Oh I love Audrey Hepburn!

Her: Me to!

Me: What’s your favorite movie she’s in?

Her: Oh I’ve never seen any of her movies.

Me: Oh…so why did you put all of these pictures on your blog?

Her: Because they’re cool…

Me: Well you should watch this movie it’s really good.

Her: Yeah I don’t really like watching things in black in white.

Me: Then why do you post about them in your blog?!?!

It was a very frustrating experience and when I looked at my other friend’s blogs I found the same things. Gifs and pictures from movies that they didn’t know and had no intention of watching. It made me angry at first and then I just felt sad, because they are going to miss out on so many amazing films.

Tumblr is a world in which people can express themselves through other people’s expressions and I think its ruining movies. So many of my friends will post pictures from classic films and instead of thinking: “Wow this is a cool picture I should find out what this is and watch it” they think: “Wow this is cool, people are going to think I’m so cool and watch such cool movies”.  I think this  is what is keeping so many young people from diving into film: they can get all of this attention for liking interesting films without actually having to put in any energy. That’s not what films are for and that’s not what they are about.

What if this was all you ever saw of "Breathless"? What would you think it was?

Films are not a way to seem cool and unique, they are works of enormous effort that make huge statements, and they should be appreciated as such. This is the mentality a lot of young people have today. It is all about image, not actual knowledge or experience.

What is most upsetting is that many of these people would love these films if they only took the time to immerse themselves in them. But when gifs and pictures are enough, there is no need to actually sit through a whole movie. This technology is made to share ideas and images of things that people love but instead it is allowing people to only care how films makes them appear not how films may influence their lives.

Who knows if Marilyn Monroe even said this? Does anyone on Tumblr care? NO!

After I talked to my friend at great length about this she decided she would only post about things she had seen and that if she saw something she liked she would research it and watch it and as a result she has become really immersed in a lot of films and directors and has come to really love and appreciate film.  I only hope other people can do the same, and we can have a lot more film lovers in the world.

Looking to the future

In the last hour, I've made two decent-sized leaps at nudging myself into the future: I set the foundations of starting a summer internship, and began the rough drafts of pre-producing a music video for an up-and-coming band over winter break.  Now I'm hoping that you guys will have some input.

First, the internship.  Over the summer, Andrew Jenks will be holding an annual film festival in New York City, which has been running for a decade now and has brought in keynote speakers like James Earl Jones (if that guy could narrate my life, I'd be one happy girl).  Though it's geared more towards high school age filmmakers, the opportunity to work as even a production assistant on something with Jenks is a step in the right direction.  He's been at this since a very young age and has made quite a name for himself (check out the linked bio, or just Google him), so I'm looking forward to this chance.  Also, he's looking for people to keep up a blog regarding the festival I believe; looks like Arturo knows what he's doing in making us write these every week.  If you want more information, let me know and I'll help you get in contact with the right people for a shot at this.

Next, the music video.  I've always had a love for music, especially because of the way it always sparks a montage in my mind as I listen.  Thus, I was asked to create More Than True's first music video of their career, and have already begun pre-production.  At the moment, I'm quite thankful for the links on this blog to necessary documents (ex: talent release forms), and I'd be interested to hear what anyone has to say about things to think of for production.  I'm also making an attempt at covering the majority of positions myself on this one, but I do have an entire week to shoot and more time to edit, so any and all advice is more than welcome.

The New Wave

I am really curious as to what you will do. Surprise yourselves!

Visualizing the newspaper of the future...

After listening to Arielle Emmett's presentation yesterday I started wondering what role, if any newspapers will play in the future. I don't think they will exist. It seems like so many times I hear journalists talk about the future of media they seem like a bunch of suits running scared of an obvious regime change.

Emmett mentioned that losing newspapers could be a threat to our very democracy. I highly doubt it. Isn't blogging the most democratic form of news? I think the news media has to resign themeselves with the fact that they can't compete with some kid with a camera phone.  Plus, they need to recognize that good writing can come from anywhere and not all of these staff writers are publishing anything worth reading.

processing progress

For this class I am working on presenting all of my Processing sketches in one place. The most user-friendly way to do this was to create a blog that also functions as an interactive portfolio. Plus, I plan to continue working in Processing and updating the blog portion with information as well as great resources.  Blogger seemed like an obvious choice and something I could upgrade as much or as little as I would like - wordpress was another option but seems to reject a lot of simple html editing as well as not displaying the java applets correctly.* I'm still working on how everything looks but please check out http://processingprogress.blogspot.com/ . These sketches will also be on http://www.openprocessing.org/ because I hope to work collaboratively in the future with other artists.

*It seems like a lot of people have had similar problems with wordpress from what I have looked at online. Will blog more on that later.

but what is it going to look like?

Hi everyone.

My drawing tools in Processing are coming along slowly but I realize now that I haven't addressed something just as important as doing research and putting in the time to learn - I haven't discussed how this will be presented! If their is one thing I have learned from Tufte, how you display everything is key to effective communication. I mean, I could just show everyone some lines of code but that's not exactly the goals of this project. I want to show the research as well as the tools I am developing.

The beauty of Processing is that it is java based so it's perfect for the web. So I have decided to make a website/blog that is easily updatable and easy for others to use. Processing sketches can easily be displayed as applets on blogs. Wordpress has some very simple clean templates that I can adapt to what I want so I think that this is where I'm going to put my work. Eventually I would like to buy my own domain and transfer all of my work there. I haven't decided if I am going to go the paid route, it seems like with the amount of data for this one project I would not have to. Plus, I have used blogger for several years and I would like to see if their is any difference.

Blogging and Interactive Technology

The last several years I have heard the benefits of blogging. I understand it allows everyone to be a ‘journalist.’ Blogs allow people to tell stories and disperse information with just a few stokes of the keys and a few clicks. The problem with this is there are no ethical guidelines nor a system in place to check facts. There have been some guidelines proposed, but you can’t get the entire world on the Web into agreement and compliance. As someone who has written for traditional media and a Webzine, I strongly value the journalism system of writers and editors.

Through the years I have been given various reasons why I should start blogging. That everyone was doing it now never was enough for me to start blogging. When I believed it might be beneficial professionally, I strongly considered it. The idea that there are lots of people who actually care what I write seems a little arrogant to me since there are billions of other people in the world. There are some positive aspects of blogging that I recognize. The use of a blog as a way to interactively exchange information (much like a forum) is definitely a positive of a blog. The use of a blog as a place to gather your opinions and thoughts is an good enough idea. Although, I still don’t understand why a person doesn’t use a private journal to express their thoughts. I’m starting to blog for my graduate visualization class.

Even though, I am apprehensive about blogging I am interested to see how it works as a informal/semi-formal means of class discussion. Now, back to the idea of visualization. We live in a world filled with visuals, which we assess in order to get a sense of scale, size, number, and amount as stated in this week’s reading. It is interesting how we use frames of reference for making judgements on quantity.

This is interesting article I found about a projector that can make visuals interactive on a variety of surfaces: Interactive Projector