A Warm Glass of Milk

This is a short animated digital story I made on Anime Studios. As described below, it is very short, very mundane and my animation skills are certainly lacking in some areas. I have certainly found a new level of respect for the animators of the world as the whole process is extremely slow and painstaking. The patience these people must have is extraordinary.

Despite all this I’m pretty happy with the final product. I hope you enjoy it!

I also uploaded it on Youtube for those who are interested in watching it in lower quality

Tools used in this production

• Adobe Photoshop CS5.1
• Smith Micro Anime Studio Pro 9
• Final Cut Pro 7.0
• Soundcloud (for sound effects)
• Vimeo
• Youtube
• My imagination

Digital Story: Progress Report

So I’ve been working a bit with Anime Studios program and I’m starting to get the hang of it. It is, however, incredibly time consuming to get anything done. I feel like Ben Wyatt on Parks and Recreation when he tried to make a stop motion film.

 

One of the first things I tried to achieve was to make my character walk. It took a while at first but here’s what I ended up with. I’m pretty happy with the results.

There’s still a bit of a jump where the animation loops but I’m going to try to iron that out. I have to say though, I’m pretty proud of the arrogance of the strut.

Level Three: we need to go deeper

For my digital storytelling project I’ve decided to rely on a simple form of animation. My story will follow an animated version of myself on a short, rather mundane adventure through a non-animated world.

I will be primarily using a program called Anime Studios from Smith Micro Software. This program allows me to do some simple 2D animation that ends up looking half decent despite my lack of any skill in the area. I will also be using Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 to convert some of my animations into animated GIF format so that I can post them here on this blog. My final product will hopefully be in a video format so that I can host it onto website such as Youtube and/or Vimeo. In the meantime I will be using Photobucket to host my GIF files as I have found it offers the best support for this sort of web hosting.

So without further ado, I introduce to you… well, me.

Well go on then, don’t just stand there blinking, say ‘hello’ at least!

Infographicality

So here we go, another one of those ‘things I have to do’ this time taking the form of an infographic which details my personal strengths and weaknesses. Whilst the task did state it had to be sort of in line with the marking criteria for previous assessment tasks I’ve instead detailed the sort of things I’d prefer to be marked on, in a perfect world that is.

The eBook Explosion

Depending on your personal preference, you’re probably either quite excited or tremendously concerned about seemingly exponential growth of the eBook medium. It seems like, right now, people tend to sort themselves into either team Paper Book or team eBook. On one side of the coin, you may excited as eBook technology is making it books more accessible and the more accessible the medium, the more likely it is to find a readership. This assertion that has been demonstrated through statistics published in the Wall Street Journal which state that the average number of books read by e-reader owners in a month was found to be 2.6, considerably higher than the 1.9 average for print-book readers. Another advantage that eBooks have over print media is the convenience that is being able to carry 100s of books on a small device. This has proved to be a great advantage for those who travel regularly and don’t want to deal with the extra weight and baggage space taken up by print books.

E-readers have become particularly popular with those who travel regularly
Credit: goodereader.com

The third, and currently the most poignant, advantage that eBooks and e-readers have is an added level of privacy for the reader. This has been evidenced recently with the astronomical success of the erotica novel Fifty Shades of Grey. The “Fifty Shades” books were originally released as eBooks by the Writers Coffee Shop, an independent publisher based in Australia. They were instant hits, drawing attention of fans and Vintage Books, which acquired the rights in March and published them as eBooks first and then as paperbacks. For woman around the world, what was once their dirty little secret could now be read in public without the fear of embarrassment.

With Fifty Shades of Grey, woman were able to hide their deviance behind the Apple logo
Credit: coverthink.com

This eBook ‘explosion’, however, is not an entirely positive thing. This surge of popularity of e-books has put many book retailers out of business, the most notable of these being Borders who closed the doors of over 800 stores across the globe in 2011. I personally much prefer reading print novels simply from a collectors mindset. I love having material, tangible copies of books that I love which I can put on a bookshelf and pick up again years down the line. I love buying old, first edition copies of classics whose bindings have cracked and whose pages have yellowed with age.  A good book has more of a soul than an eBook ever will. In fact I would venture to say an eBook lacks any kind of soul altogether. I understand that eBooks hold a certain practicality that is absent in print media but this is forged from a loss of sentimentality and it is for this reason that I still plan to have a library room if I ever work up the funds to realistically achieve such a thing. I’ve always considered myself someone who is eager to see technology reach its full potential and it is a natural inclination for me to hope the the eBook continues to grow in popularity. However, if this ends up being at the expense of the print novel I can see myself becoming the guarded conservative I always knew I’d become.

Six Degrees of Channing Tatum

So I just finished watching a BBC documentary on the ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ theory (yes, the one of Kevin Bacon fame) and there really was very little to fault about it. In fact, I would even venture to say I found the whole thing pretty fascinating.

The program was based around an experiment of sorts which posed the question: can strangers get a package from one side of the world to the other in only 6 moves? Whilst this was a fun exercise to add a bit of visual flavour to the program, it was the science the was interwove within it that really interested me.

According to recent studies into networks and how things are all connected, there appears to be this a  mathematical formula which we have all been living under, obliviously, our whole lives. And it’s not just us! The beauty of this is that ALL networks in society and in life follow this same mathematical pattern. The internet, the human brain, roads, and the mating habits of the snowy tree cricket all follow this same pattern.

This really is ground breaking stuff and, if used efficiently, could completely changes how we look at things like cancer, disease, or how genetic mutations talk to each other. It will be able to tell us how disease spreads, and how best to cope with it. Networks is the science of the future are it is the science of predicting the future. Once we have worked out how and why things communicate the way they do we will be able to start predicting occurences before they have even come to pass. Crazy Stuff!

Let’s give this a shot!

Yay my Bacon number is 3!

The Internet: Master of the Puppeteers

OK let’s have a look at another one of these documentaries. This time I watched an episode of  documentary series Download: the true story of the Internet titled People Power. This was the description posted with the video:

“The Internet has changed society and a new breed of entrepreneurs is shaping the digital future. Find out how it all started with Napster, a way of swapping music dreamt up by the teenaged Shawn Fanning.”

First reaction I had to the video was that the host, John Heilemann, came across as one of the most insufferable douchebags (sorry it really was the only word that suited) I’ve witnessed. He reminded me of your typical jock trying to compensate for his limited knowledge by shouting everything he says and calling some of the most influential internet entrepreneurs nerds and Doogie Howser’s. Turns out he’s a pretty successful political journalist and best-selling author. Look, I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice guy, I’m just glad he found himself behind the typewriter as opposed to in front of the camera.

Apologies to this guy..

Despite the host being ‘incredibly charismatic and slightly obnoxious’ (he actually describes himself as that) the episode actually features an impressive collection of internet entrepeneurs including Youtube’s Chad Hurley, Digg’s Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Napster’s Shawn Fanning. It is important to note that this was made in 2008, a time when Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth was a measly $1.5 billion and he had more time for low-budget Science Channel documentary series. In 2012, Zuckerberg is worth $10.2 billion (note this is following the Facebook IPO catastrophe which lost him about  $7 billion) and, due to his inflated, post-Social Network ego, is less likely to sink himself to this level.

After about ten minutes of Heilemann preaching to the power of the internet and explaining his theory that communication is the deepest human impulse we finally get to the focus of the story, the emergence of Napster and downfall at the hands of Metallica’s Lars Ulrich (booo!).

Worst.. bloke.. ever

In 1999, 18-year old Shawn Fanning released the peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing network Napster. Napster was originally created as a way for Fanning and his close friends to share music in digital mp3 format.  Prior to the legal battles with Metallica and Dr Dre alike, there were to be 75 million Napster users and approximately 10,000 music files shared per second using Napster by the end of 2000.

Lars Ulrich may have won that battle he did little to win the war. Today, Internet piracy is flourishing (can I say that?) through various peer-to-peer (p2p) networks that Napster paved the way for. Think of programs like Limewire and the ever popular BitTorrent services. Even congressman Lamar S. Smith and his SOPA legislation couldn’t put a dent in the ever-growing industry.

Lamar S. Smith

Smith planned to place the burden for policing user activity on websites and ISPs, requiring them to block access to a site that is accused of violating the law. The bill threatens freedom of speech, innovation and that the act could be used to block entire domains on the basis that one of the websites posts copyrighted material.

Luckily for us the people who run websites like Wikipedia and Reddit are pretty damn cool. They organised a blackout of their popular webpages as a protest against the bill, effectively scaring any support Smith had put together right out of Congress.

The Internet is here to stay and, regretfully for people like Mr Smith, that means piracy and pornography are here to stay too. With the emergence of legal music applications, like iTunes and Spotify, it appears the music industry is finally learning to adapt. This isn’t the death of the music industry, this is a revitalisation.

One with the machine

So I just learnt I’m apparently required to watch some online documentaries as a part of my Networked Media subject.. Luckily I’m a fan of crazy space docos and ‘Let’s find Atlantis’ shows so that’s all good with me. One of the options we were given was called, 2057: The City of the Future, and that was a wacky enough title to pique my interest. What the video entailed, along with some poorly acted ‘future’-based segments, was a collection of ‘experts’ with a whole bunch of letters after their names making crazy predictions of what society will be like in 50 years (45 years for those of us living in 2012). Predictions included the invention of self-driving cars, hologram AI buddies who follow you around everywhere and.. wait for it.. an online supermarket that will deliver items to your house (?).

The wonders of 2057: we can all have holographic shark friends!

It’s amusing to compare these predictions to those that were made 44 years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Whilst Kubrick was almost Nostradamus-esque in some of his predictions of the future (namely flat-screen televisions, iPad like tablet devices, voice identification systems, video teleconferencing and in-flight entertainment), he dramatically overestimated human advances in space-travel and AI technology. It’s pretty goddamn exciting that NASA successfully landed the Curiosity rover on Mars a couple of weeks ago but it’s far from the manned mission to Jupiter that Kubrick predicated for us. And that was for 11 years ago, who knows where we would have been now at that rate!

Kubrick took us to Jupiter 48 years before Juno is set to arrive.

With all this talk of the future I am reminded of a book I read last summer, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. Like the two texts I’ve mentioned previously, this book is bursting at the seams with predictions of the future. The most significant of these is the theory of a technological singularity which Kurzweil believes will become reality by the year 2045. In brief, the singularity occurs as artificial intelligence surpasses human beings as the smartest and most capable life form on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on. Essentially, it is the moment that machines achieve world domination.. This is sounds like an I, Robot apocalypse if you ask me.

Is this our future?

As scary as this sounds Kurzweil argues that this does not mean the end of human civilization for the simple fact that by this stage sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.

We will be one with machine.

…maybe. I guess only time will tell.

Lawrence Lessig eat your heart out

I was watching an episode of The West Wing a while back and was quite surprised to see Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig being portrayed as a character by none other than Christopher Lloyd. Yes, that Christopher Lloyd.

Credit: thenewstribune.com

It struck me as odd  as the show barely ever had ‘guest appearences’ from real world characters. One of the only other example I can think of would be the episode in which magicians Penn & Teller cause a stir by apparently burning the stars and stripes at the White House.

Turns out a student from Lessig’s Constitutional Law class at Harvard ended up writing for The West Wing.. Lessig explained in his blog that the story portrayed on screen was actually based on truth and that he had been involved in the drafting of one early version of the Georgian constitution. Apparently, he had told this story once during a lecture to Law students at Harvard and it made it all the way to the small screen. Pretty cool thing to happen if you ask me.

Anyway on with what this post was actually meant to be about. In accordance to Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons, I have decided on that my ‘work’ is free to share, remix and make commercial use of as long as you credit me and distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.

As for ways to manage all the spam I’m likely to encounter on my super popular blog (cue eye roll) I can either monitor it myself and delete the offending posts individually or I can take more proactive measures.  Akismet is a plugin that is built into WordPress. It’s very effective at blocking spammers – it marks suspicious comments as spam and files them away in a spam folder. That’s so easy.. Yaya!