Podcast Project!!!

Fantastic Flash Documentaries!

In Anders Fagerjord’s, Multimodal Polyphony, he discusses the importance and use of multimodal polyphony on the world wide web. We are constantly surrounded by different mediums: writing, images, music, and videos. 

One way that all these mediums were combined was in Flash Documentaries that became popular on the internet in 2000 and 2001. As Fagerjord describes, “Using media’s Flash software, Web authors were able to create documentary films of still images and voice-over commentary, and distribute them as files small enough for Web download. These are narrated, timed slideshows, where still images are ‘made moving’ by moving the frame in panning, tilting, or zooming the image” (Fagerjord, p. 2). Until this article, I had never really heard of these Flash Documentaries, but these are very similar to what we are doing with our slideshows presently. We are taking our still image pictures and combining them with commentary.

These flash documentaries do three important things for us as viewers:

1. We can take in the experience by looking and listening.
2. The language and photos are both dynamic, so rhythm and time become an important factor.
3. We isolate different devices that are inspired by rhetoric and can be used again by other people.

In order to be able to make a flash documentary effective and meaningful for viewers, the writing, photography (images), music, sound effects, and narration must all come together in a symbiotic way. Everything must be timed correctly, arranged correctly, and communicated correctly in order to effectively convey the narrative of the documentary. These are all important things to keep in mind while working on our next project in class!

Here is an example of a flash documentary I found online:

Are you hearing, listening, or both?

In The Zen of Listening, the idea of listening and hearing is discussed. It says, "We can passively hear, but we must actively listen." This concept is something that I find to be so important. Its like when you are having a conversation with someone. You can passively hear what they are saying and know what words they are forming, how they are stringing them together, and what those equal. However, to actively listen, one must be able to understand the words, understand what together they mean, AND THEN to understand the context and understand what the other person is trying to entirely communicate.

Radio is a form of audible transmission that people have loved for years!! It has a nostalgic hold on people, whether you are tuning in for talk radio (like NPR) or just some good tunes. While listening to radio, as consumers, we are constantly switching back and forth between hearing and listening. We are hearing when we just hear the different sounds, instruments, and words of a song. We are listening when we hear what the combination of all those things is trying to convey to us as a listener.

Slideshow!!!!

Slideshow Photo Editing!

I really enjoyed getting to play around with Photoshop with this slideshow. I didn't do anything too crazy with my photo editing because I was trying to think in terms of if these pictures were being used on Furman's Housing and Residence Life page they would want them to look like the real thing with simple adjustments to enhance the photographs. The six photos I chose to post to my blog shows the more dramatically or tricky to edit photos. However, pretty much all the photos were edited in some manner (cropping and light adjustment).

Picture 1:

For these photos, I adjusted the color and the contrast to make the colors more vivid. I also made a layer with the text so that it was easily identifiable to people who don't know or recognize the building.




Picture 2:

In this photo I cropped the bottom because it was just a lot of extra space that was unnecessary. I also had the text layer to show make clear what the viewer was looking at. The most important thing I did was to adjust the contrast so that the Greek letters were crisper and could be read better against the brick.


Picture 3:

For these photos I cropped some of the excess sides out. I also tried to do something artsy with the black and white photo, and also highlighting the two faces in the photo in white.

Picture 4:

In this picture I played with the lighting a bit because of the night time photography on my phone. I also added a text layer in order to label the picture of what was going on, because by looking at the photo it isn't entirely clear.

Picture 5:

This photo was actually a trickier one for me. The original photo I took really was not doing the colors in the bedspread justice and just looked very dull. So, I played around with the brightness and the contrast of the photo to get a more authentic look of the room. I also put the text overlay on the photo.






Picture 6:

This photo was probably the photo that I went back and forth on the most editing wise. I didn't like all the reflections that the mirrors were casting in each other so I cropped most of the mirrors out so that it was really focused on the bathroom vanity sink. However, I am not entirely sure whether that did the bathroom a justice or injustice. I also slightly adjusted the crispness and lighting in the photo.

Given and New in Composition!

The composition or layout of a web page can greatly hinder or highlight the page’s content. Of course, this idea pertains to the text presented on a page. Having hard to read text, bad color choice, text that is too small, or text that is all concentrated in one are of a page can negatively impact a reader’s experience. However, this importance of composition and layout is also very essential to the effectiveness and meaning ascribed to images. 

One of my favorite points that Kress and Leeuwen addressed in the reading The Meaning of Composition is the idea of the “new” and the “given. Kress and Leeuwen writes, “For something to be Given means that it is presented as something the viewer already knows, as a familiar and agreed-upon point of departure for the message. For something to be New means that it is presented as something which is not yet known, or perhaps not yet agreed upon by the viewer, hence as something to which the viewer must pay special attention.”

The eye is trained to, accustomed to, and comfortable with reading from left to right. This makes sense with how the concept of Given and New images are then articulated in a composition. Something that is a Given image is often presented on the left side of a layout, while something that is New is often presented on the right side of a layout. 

Some of the examples shown in the reading were really dark because of the scanning, so I tried to find a good example on my own. Hopefully I am not too far off track! I found this article and thought it was a good, yet very basic example of this Given and New principle. 

The Proactive website opens and you see scrolling images on the left of beautiful famous people with gorgeous skin, and on the right you see the three step proactive system. The Given then is that “these women have gorgeous skin” the New is that “you can get that skin with Proactive!”

You, the Viewer, Making Meaning!

In the reading, Viewers Make Meaning, Cartwright and Sturken discuss the important and determining role that viewers play in giving an image its effective meaning. They list three ways, other then the image and the producer, that an image is given meaning:

1. the codes and conventions that structure the image and that cannot be separated from the content of the image
2. the viewers and how they interpret or experience the image
3. the contexts in which an image is exhibited and viewed

All these things listed are produced by the viewer and the environment surrounding the image and the viewer of the image. 

Another concept discussed in the article that I found very interesting was the idea of interpellation. “To be interpellated by an image, then, is to know that the image is meant for me to understand, even if I feel that my understanding is unique or goes against the grain of a meaning that seems to have been intended.” When I read this advertising was a natural thought in my mind. 

Beer commercials are always stand outs for me. I know that they often aren’t marketed towards me because I am a woman, but some of them I find highly entertaining. Beer commercials interpellate me because I know what they are intending to do even if they are not targeting me, and to some degree the effectiveness (or cleverness) of a beer commercial does convince me to buy a brand. One beer commercial that I adore is by Heineken:

BEER CLOSET COMMERCIAL

ENJOY!!!