The Four Amigos...16mm Film Manipulation Second Response

Assignment 1: Direct 16mm Film Manipulation 

This was the first film I actually got to get my hands on and create an original experimental collaboration. Wilks was my partner. We combined our film strips to create a fast-pace interpretation of the assigned theme of the four elements. Being a nature lover, I personally was excited that the Greek classical elements: fire, earth, air, and water, was the inspiration for our films.

I applied ink, oil, bleach, and paint to by 9 ft. strip of print stock. I also punched holes, scratched, and scraped with sandpaper. I used colors that represented the four elements in my mind: red/orange for fire, blue for water, green for earth, and grey/blue for air.

For my magazine transfer, I cut up a surfing magazine the illustrate water. However, this did not transfer very well; the image was very light. Therefore, I did another magazine transfer with images of fire from a razor advertisement. This transferred much better, but it wouldn’t stay sticky. I had to use tape to secure the images.

I was excited about the Rayogram printing. I brought spices from home that I thought would represent “earth,” such as basil, coriander, and salt. I also added flower decals and magazine print. I ended up being very disappointed though. The images did not translate very well at all. Most of my print was dark and unintelligible. Also, a portion of my strips did not get “fixed” all the way, and a yellow blob resulted on my prints. On the other hand, Wilks did a good job. So I was glad to have a partner to collaborate with.

The hardest section for me was the animation. I have never done any kind of animation before. Furthermore, I am not the best drawer. So, I had a difficult time getting started. I decided to keep it simple, as demonstrated in the example of turning a circle into a square. I chose to do triangles. 

The four classic elements are still essential symbols of the cultures and belief systems of many groups, including Native Americans, pagans and various tribal groups throughout the world. More modern groups such as Wiccan have adopted various symbols from these ancient cultures. 

During the Greek Hellenic civilization, the symbols used to represent the four elements of Greek physics were based on the triangle.

• Fire: Triangle points up
• Water: Triangle points down
• Air: Triangle points up with a horizontal line through center of triangle
• Earth: Triangle points down with a horizontal line through center of triangle

For my animation, I created a sequence where a triangle would change into each of the representations for the four elements. I also used the repetitive colors to illustrate each element as well. 

Overall, I was very pleased with the end result of the combination of materials between Wilks and I. I am proud of our film, and I believe together, we successfully created a 60 second manipulation that inhabit the essence of the four elements. 

Come Together..."R3" Media Response

Notes on "R3" Media:

"What is Crowdsourcing?"

• Daily Crowdsource
• Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers.
• Famous Example: Wikipedia. 
• Crowdsourcing & Quality: The principle of crowdsourcing is that more heads are better than one. By canvassing a large crowd of people for ideas, skills, or participation, the quality of content and idea generation will be superior.
• Different Types of Crowdsourcing:
• Crowdsource Design
• Tell a crowd of designers what you want, how much you will pay, and your deadline
• All interested designers will create a finished design specifically for you. 
• You can keep whichever design you like the best. 
• Increases the quality
• Decreases the price
• Designs for furniture, fashion, advertisements, video, & product design. 
• Just about anything that can be designed can be crowdsourced.
• Crowdfunding
• Asking a crowd of people to donate money to your project. 
• You find a crowdfunding platform, set the goal amount, deadline, and any rewards offered to donors. 
• You must raise 100% of your goal before the deadline, or all the donations are returned to the donors. 
• I.e. Gofundme, kickstarter, etc.
• Crowdfunding is mostly used by artists, charities, & start-ups to raise money for projects such as filming a documentary, manufacturing an iPod watch, cancer research, or seed money.
• Microtasks
• Breaking work up into tiny tasks and sending the work to a crowd of people. 
• Break up the work and decide the payment for each completed task
•  You can expect to see results within minutes. 
• Microtasking can involve tasks such as scanning images, proofreading, database correction and transcribing audio files.
• Work is done faster, cheaper, and usually with less errors
• Additionally, microtasks can often be performed by people in less fortunate countries
• Open Innovation
• "Open innovation allows people from all aspects of business such as investors, designers, inventors, and marketers to collaborate into a functional profit making reality. 
• This can be done either through a dedicated web platform to gain outside perspective, or used with only internal employees.
• Open innovation brings together people from different parts of the world and different sectors of business to work together on a project. 
• This is effectively a collection of different fields and levels of expertise that would not otherwise be available to any budding entrepreneur. 
• It also elevates previously considered uninvolved parties, such as investors, to roll up their sleeves and impart their knowledge, essentially becoming more than just a cash cow."
• Pros:
• The ability to receive better quality results, since several people offer their best ideas, skills, & support. 
• Crowdsourcing allows you to select the best result from a sea of ‘best entries,’ as opposed to receiving the best entry from a single provider. 
• Results can be delivered much quicker than traditional methods, since crowdsourcing is a form of freelancing. 
• You can get a finished video within a month, a finished design or idea within a week, and microtasks appear within minutes.
• Cons: 
• Clear instructions are essential in crowdsourcing. 
• You could potentially be searching through thousands of possible ideas, which can be painstaking, or even complicated, if the instructions are not clearly understood. 
• Some forms of crowdsourcing do involve spec work, which some people are against.
• Quality can be difficult to judge if proper expectations are not clearly stated.

"Jimmy Wales: The Birth of Wikipedia"

• TED
• 1962, Charles Van Doren, (senior editor of Britannica) said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical -- it should stop being safe. 
•  imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
• funded by donations from the public
• Costs very little to run Wikipedia 
• Over 600,000 articles in English 
• 2 million total articles across many different languages 
• Truly global 
• Yochai 
• freely licensed encyclopedia
• It's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many, many languages
• It's written using Wiki software - so anyone can quickly edit and save, and it goes live on the Internet immediately. 
• Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, 
• Nonprofit organization 
• Founded by Jimmy Wales
• Our goal: the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation, is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. 
• It means a lot more than just building a cool website. 
• We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions.
• A lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet
• "And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model
• because that empowers local entrepreneurs -- or anyone who wants to, can take our content and do anything they like with it -- you can copy it, redistribute it and you can do it commercially or non-commercially"
• All the editing is done by volunteers. 
• And the way that we're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine.
• "People are always asking, "Well, who's in charge of this?" or "Who does that?" And the answer is: anybody who wants to pitch in." 
• It's a very unusual and chaotic thing. 
• We've got over 90 servers now in three locations. 
• These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online. 
• "You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we're doing at Wikipedia."
• And everything is managed by the volunteers. 
• And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about $5,000 (main cost)
• Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy: 
• The media has covered this somewhat extensively. 
• It started out with an article in Red Herring. 
• The articles were edited quite heavily. 
• And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions. 
• Time magazine recently reported that "Extreme action sometimes has to be taken, and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004." 
• This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for -- occasionally a little bit here and there.
• In summary, not really a controversy in reality 
• Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot, but they don't cause much controversy within the community. 
• The real struggle is not between the right and the left - that's where most people assume -but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. 
• Elements:
• Mostly social policies  
• Some elements of the software
• Biggest and the most important thing: neutral point-of-view policy. 
• A core principle of the community that's completely not debatable. 
• It's a social concept of cooperation
• The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the "truth" about some topic, that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write, because I don't agree with you about what's the truth. 
• Neutrality: any time there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue. 
• We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it. 
• Very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious, cultural backgrounds. 
• Someone will notice the change very quickly, and then they'll just simply revert the change.
• 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users. 
• Very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication. 
• The tools and the software: 
• There's lots of tools that allow us -- allow us, meaning the community -- to self-monitor and to monitor all the work. 
• You can see changes immediately 
• We leave everything very open-ended. 
• There's nothing in the software that enforces the rules. 
• Rick Kay is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxesand votes for deletion. 
• We try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral. 
• There's a certain amount of aristocracy. 
• Jimmy Wales: "benevolent dictator" - "I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world."
• A need still for a certain amount of monarchy
• "That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our opennessand freedom to undermine the quality of the content. And so as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me."
• "I can't tell anyone what to do."
• So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works, 
• it's important to understand that our Wiki model is the way we work:
• we're very flexible about the social methodology
• it's ultimately the passion of the community is for the quality of the work
• not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it.
• A lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia.
• There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false. 
• It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers. 
• And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia
• Academics hate it and teachers hate Wikipedia
• But I think there's going to be huge impacts. And we actually have a project that I'm personally really excited about, which is the 
• Wiki books project: an effort to create textbooks in all the languages. 
• 20 years or so  
• Our mission: giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. 
• A tool that they can use
• Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

"The Cloud Filmmaking Manifesto"

• April 20, 2013
• Director Tiffany Shlain 
• Keynote address 
• Tribeca Film Festival’s Interactive Day
• Cloudsourcing Creativity and Giving Back in the Age of Collaboration
• Tiffany Shlain 
• Remixing and recontextualizing images
• Filmmaker
• Director
• Filmmaking style of remixing came out of necessity 
• Film theory student ant UC Berkeley in the early 1990's 
• No film production facilities 
• "The idea of recontextualizing images from different eras to express larger ideas about modern times was very exciting to me."
• Archival aesthetic is the foundation of filmmaking style 
• Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death, & Technology: comprised of a combination of archival images from many eras sewn together with new original animations
• "My attempt to understand our world, where we came form, and where we're headed." 
• The new tools and technologies that enable video sharing have allowed me and my team at The Moxie Institute to embark on "cloud filmmaking" 
• Biggest line items: licensing footage and creating animation 
• "It’s an ever growing moveable visual feast of delicacies from all over around the world."
• Let it Ripple: Mobile Films for Global Change : 
  a short film series that leverages the creativity of individuals and organizations from across the globe. 
• A Declaration of Interdependence (first film in this series)
• rewrote the U.S. Declaration of Independence 
• July 4, 2011
• "We then asked people through social media either to video themselves reading the script, or to submit artwork that represented ideas in the script."
• Videos and art submissions poured in from all over the world, 
  in all different languages. 
• The experiment was not only working, it was bigger than we imagined.
• "The participatory revolution" 
• 4 minute global mash-up demonstrating the vast potential of creative collaboration in the 21st century
• Example of "the participatory revolution”
• “For centuries we’ve declared our independence. Perhaps it’s now time we declare our interdependence.” 
• In responding to this last line of the film, we launched our foray into Cloud Filmmaking.
• Cloud Filmmaking: 
• Collaborating on the film as one. 
• Working with footage that people shot and sent from all over the world
• We were all invested in seeing the film happen and the final message
• Different way to premiere it
• We decided to do a simultaneous online and live premiere
• Featured by YouTube 
• "It felt like a space-time-cinema shift."
• The film has now been volunteer-translated into 65 languages.
• The next phase of Cloud Filmmaking: giving back. 
• Free customized versions of the film for nonprofits and organizations all over the world. 
• We work with them to craft a custom “call to action” then replace our “call to action” with theirs.
• Now, we are taking Cloud Filmmaking to a mobile app. 
• Connected App
• iPhone, android and iPad 
• Free
• Add even more tools to the collective toolbox of participation for both Connected and the Let it Ripple series
• Built-in recording so that you can participate by contributing to the next film, sharing your stories about using the films or about interdependence, or your ideas on the “participatory revolution.”
• Regularly updated database of research and posts about “connectedness in the 21st century” 
• Information on how to host a screening, 
• Instructions on how to use interactive discussion tools where both the host and the audience can engage with the research, conversation cards, and discussion book before and after the film
• You can also license our Educator’s Edition and receive both printed materials for the class and the mobile app to engage, participate, and give back. 
• The app is yet another way of redefining the relationship between the creator and the receiver. 
• Cloud Filmmaking is about everyone participating.
• Second film in the Let it Ripple series: Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks
• Based on exciting research from Harvard, University of Washington, and UCBerkeley on how to best nurture a young child’s brain. 
• Based on this research, we looked at the parallels between nurturing the growth of the brain and nurturing the growth of the Internet 
• Over the next four years we will make 20 of these short films, evolving the way we collaborate with people and organizations.
• “The Age of Collaboration” : "People around the world are able to share strategies when catastrophe strikes; scientists are opening up problems to gamers to solve previously unsolvable problems, and artists and inventors can gather groups of supporters to help them fund their projects."
• "My team at The Moxie Institute and I are cloudsourcing creativity to tell collaborative, universal stories that can be used by organizations all over the world."
• The possibilities keep expanding for people to tell their stories. I love when Apple added a second camera to the front of the phone so people can now film themselves with ease, removing any mediation between people recording their ideas and stories.
• We ultimately are a species of storytellers. 
• This is how we share, empathize and learn. 
• “The Internet and movie makers  have collided, and the result is a cloud film-making revolution.” – Dean Takahashi, Venture Beat