Harmony

See what HTML 5 can do~

Website Project

Here is the link to the website,

http://dm.finearts.yorku.ca/~shgfl007/

Please use Safari to view the website

*Nov. 30,
               Problem fixed, haven't tried IE so far, but the website works in Safari, FireFox, Chrome and Opera

Website Theme

For the website, it would be personal site. This site would be something like “My Journey” and would divide in two parts: the “Cyber Me” and the “Reality Me”. The “Cyber Me” would focus on my interests in the Digital Media field and the “Reality Me” would relate to my life.

Another idea is a website about the video game history. It will have a time line on the main page, and all the contents are all based on that time line.

These are only basic concepts and may get changed at anytime.

Mini-assignment2

http://dm.finearts.yorku.ca/~shgfl007/test1.html

MINI-ASSIGNMENT

http://dm.finearts.yorku.ca/~shgfl007/remix.html

“Here Comes Everybody”& “Small Change”

    These two articles all talked about the network and social communication. For the first chapter of “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky, he used an example of a Wall Streeter getting back a smart phone from a teenage girl using the new technology. In the story, we can easily find that the case Shirky was talking about can never happen in last century or even in past eight years. It is difficult to imagine that thousands of people were attracted by the webpage made by Evan, the Wall Streeter, and as well as the story. People helped Evan to find the phone and finally get the phone back. Shirky only used one case to demonstrate the power of the network.

    The article in New Yorkers talked about communication revolution. Malcolm Gladwell took many examples in the history and explained “Why the revolution will not be tweeted”. He took several examples in last century before all the “popular communication tools” was invented and made great influences at the time. He explore the life without these tools that we can hardly imagine a day without these Internet things. And finally said that “What happens next is more of the same”.

    So for these two arguments, I think the latter one is more believable than the first one since Gladwell used a lot of examples from the history and made his arguments believable.

The We Agree Ads

       The Yes Men used Chevron’s advertising idea and exaggerate the fact. In the original version of the “we agree”, Chevron used several print ads to make an interactive advertisement. On their site, these print ads are designed as vote print ads. They build this kind of system in order to show the amount of the people who agree with the concept they’ve put on their print ads.

       On the other hand, Yes Men used the same idea of “We Agree”. But the difference is that Yes Men used larger print ads and the photos they used are more related to the problems that the oil or oil companies had brought to the environment and people. In the Yes Men version of We Agree, the theme is more obvious than the original version. And for the photos these different two versions had under or beside the print ad, Chevron used people’s faces to show that they are a company that like common “people”, and for the Yes Men’s ad, they also used people’s faces, but they used photos that combines people’s faces with the environment with the problems that brought by the oil and the oil company. So in the Yes Men version of the We Agree, they exaggerate the fact rather than the data of who agree with the concept. The most important thing of the Yes Men version is the signature of Rex Northen (Executive Director, Cleantech Open) and Desmond King (president of Chevron Technology Ventures) with a big stamp of “We Agree”. This made the ad more powerful and believable than Chevron’s original version. So at this point, Yes Men made the “fake” We Agree more powerful than the original version, and they made it ironic.

Isn't that unfair?

    Chapter 3 from Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture mainly talked about a case of Jesse Jordan, who was sued by RIAA because of the Copyright law. RIAA charge a large amount of money form Jesse, because they thought Jesse broke the Copyright law.

    Jesse built a search engine himself and shared data with other students and faculties of the RPI community. The files Jesse had for sharing were photos, copies of research and other things the users of RPI made available in a public folder of their computer. In other words, what Jesse had done was fixed a bug of Windows file sharing program and use the pre-existed searching engine for file sharing on campus. So in my opinion, this is not something can be considered as breaking the Copyright law and it was insane to charge Jesse that large amount of money.

    As we can see, the resources of Jesse’s search engine were from other people’s public files and they have to made these things available or other people of the community may not be able to access these files. So, at this point, it means that the owner of the files had already agreed to share with other members.  This was all about providing and sharing resources. The most ironic thing was that the two out of three students who against Jesse were from other universities. So from my perspective, this case was totally unfair for Jesse.

Remix-Video

Video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=869TH8yEN4s

Here is the video.
For this video, I did it from the first-person perspective. The character in this video is a dolphin.
The first parts of this video shows how wild dolphins are living in the ocean, and the second part of the video shows the last scene of this dolphin's life.
In this video, I used words to guess what dolphins are feeling from a human's view. At this point, I hope that my audiences can feel the same way as the dolphin in the video, and also think that what if we are those dolphins, what we would do, what we would feel. These things are all aimed at rising an awareness and having a sympathy of not only dolphins but also other wild lives in this world.

Sources:
The water turns to red
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvhXyK8W10E

What If I told you Dolphins were going extinct?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-9x6msiKho&feature=fvsr

Swimming with Dolphins-BBC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_o69kwicAk&feature=fvw

Mufasa's Death Again (With intense music)   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkcJrW65xjI

Enya-Orinoco Flow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlXKGh_PqYE&p=A9835C7AC04CF36E&index=35&feature=BF

Remix-Picture

     These two remix pictures shows the relationship between human and animals. The theme of this remix project is rise the awareness to protect animals and stop killing animals for their fur or other parts of their bodies.
    For the first picture, I chose some kinds of a collage style and make it looks like a family photo board. The photos on the board, not all but most of them have their story. So the aim of the first picture is to show that human and animals are a family that can help each other while the other is in danger.
    The second one combined 70 photos of how human is killing animals or abuse animals for medical or cosmetics tests. The red color is the main color, because all these acts are bloody and cruel. The big "stop!" above the red background means that we should do something to stop these cruel actions to protect animals because they are not only our neighbor or friends but also our family on the Earth.

Sources:
For the sources of the second one, since 70 photos is a lot, I will upload my combined work here.

http://www.decipheringlife.com/theme-pages/humans_and_animal_connection.htm

David Hoffos, Scenes from the house dream

      The exhibition of David Hoffos in MOCCA is pretty impressive. David Hoffos, a contemporary Canadian artist, is widely recognized for unique illusionist installations. His works in the exhibition in MOCCA are somehow a little bit crappy but still interesting.

      Most of his works has an interior environment and one or two glass broads. He used many old TV screens to make the images of people and other things like curtains in the interior environment. As long as I knew, making a image in an environment look 3D would probably need several projectors to build a light body for the image, but in this exhibition, David Hoffos just used TV screens and glass broads to make the images look like they are 3D. We found that the image was projected by the TV screen to the glass broad and the images on the TV screen are short videos of either human or other things we can find in our lives.

      Since the images are coming from the TV screen, the whole interior looks pretty crappy because of the colors of the image (mostly, blue and white). Although there are more equipment we can use to make a 3D image in such an interior space, David Hoffos still chose an easy way to show the image, but hard way to think about.

Remix Theme & Inspirations

      For the Remix theme, I’m not 100% sure about what to do for now, but I do feel that I want to make something that is related to “wildlife conservation”. I know this is an old theme, but since the day I watched “The Cove”, I was totally shocked. So I might do something that related to this theme.

     And I also have another idea that is greatly related to the improvement of the image quality of games.

For the inspiration, Erik Johansson is one of my inspirations for this project. The combination of two different objects is the technique that I want to use in my own project, and I found that Erik Johansson uses the technique make things interesting and also make people think about the theme and the emotion he wanted to express.

     Another inspiration would be Ricardo Salamanca. The idea of a bear wearing a bear costume in the circus is an inspiration of the animal protection.

Inclass Assignment

     This video is made up by several opening in the series of Final Fantasy. This is my favorite game series, so I tried to make a new trailer by combine those things together. The background music is from FF 13, and it's the battale theme. I chose this piece of music to be the background music because for me this is the most impressive music I've heard in the series, and since it's the battle theme, it will make people feel exciting. For selling a game(or more games), it's important to let people feel exciting of the game because when people get exciting of the game, there's a greater chance to make the potential buyers to really buyers.
   In the video, I put some game scenes in the video as well, because in the trailer, some people are more focus on the quality of the animation, like the opening, but for some players, they really focus on the quality and the feeling of the gaming scene and the battle scene. So in order to attract both kinds of potential buyers, I put both kinds of scenes together to make the trailer, and hopefully, this trailer can attract people to love the series.


Sources：


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJPbozRomX4

Final Fantasy XIII International X10 Trailer    

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT12DW2Fm9M

Final Fantasy IV DS Opening

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk6e8al-mHQ

Final Fantasy XIII Music - Blinded By Light (Battle Theme)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D16uzMf8BOk

Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core - English Opening

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N26t6cSRLsw

Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core: Sephiroth vs Genesis and Angeal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naUSBEVRLng

E3 09: Final Fantasy XIII Trailer

Web is not dead

      Is the Web dead? It’s pretty hard to say whether it’s dead or not, since the situation of either the usage of the Web or the usage of the Internet is quite different. And because in some countries the Web is still popular, so the Web is not dead, it’s maybe dying, but not dead. As it is said in the article that the apps are becoming more and more common and widely used, some similar function in the web has been abandoned or say not that frequently used. But on the other hand, some apps are paid apps, and for people who don’t like to use paid apps just for simplify their life, they will still need to use a browser to surf the web in order to use the service they want to use. And it is also said “digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semi closed platforms….. driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing”, as a matter of fact, in some parts of the world, iPhone is still something luxury, not everybody can afford an iPhone. In these parts, Web is still been widely used, and there’s not foreshadowing that shows web is dead or dying until something that has an iPhone model been widely used.

     Nobody can know what will happen in the future. And for now, from the view of the world, Web is still been widely used. And there will always be web lovers who want to make web better. Or after a few years, apps will replaced by something combine the advantages of both apps and web browsers. Who knows? But for now, the Web is not dead in the whole world.

ABOUT ME

       My name is Danning and I’m a first year Digital Media student at York. I’m interested in animation, games, and filmmaking or say anything that related to digital entertainment.

      The reason why I choose this course? Electronic Landscape will introduce new media, which has a lot of possibilities to be discovered and putted to practical use. This course also tells the basis of the industry and its impact on culture output other than just introduction of how to use specific software to draw or edit. On the other hand, it is also important to know how to use the software to really make things, and that means to explore different mediums that are called as a part of new media. This is all about what new media is, what new media can do, and what I can do in the field of new media. As a Digital Media major, those are the questions that I need to find answers and I do expecting this course can give me lots of hints to help me find the answers to those questions.

Inclass Mini-assignment

     This is a combination of several pictures, some of them are used as texture in the final picture.

     As you can see in the last picture, there are two different symbols that represent different kind of culture. The symbol on the left side is the symbol of my traditional culture which is dragon come out of Chinese culture with a rather western texture. On the right side, there is a symbol out of popular culture with a rather eastern style texture. For the background it is a texture from an western styled door. All these elements are indicating my life in a different country, and in a different circumstance that combines different cultures. The smoke around the dragon's head shows that the mysterious side of the eastern culture. And the fire all around the picture shows either the conflict between those two cultures or the passion of either cultures.

The original pictures are: