Week 6 Lecture

I'm in a less-cynical mood today (even though the results of the past 5 weeks would beg to differ) so I'll hold back a bit in this blog.

While the idea of a computer being under the same category as a TV seemed a strange concept to me (hell the idea the TV being under the same category as the Cinema was strange) but I guess it's becoming a more and more likely thing as days go by; I mean people apparently do buy 'media center' computers that are basically a glorified television sets, but with the versatility of a computer behind it. They serve their purpose and Microsoft felt there was enough of a market for them to make a special operating system just for this very purpose (the programmized version that is included in versions of Windows Vista is imaginatively known as 'Windows Media Center').

I'm not really sure how I feel about fan movies, it's a case of judge by each individual case than judge the whole idea of it. Fan edits are also quite dubious because the whole idea is quite pretentious considering by doing it you're basically saying you'd know better than the original creator. Probably why Star Wars tends to have so many of those. I have actually seen the Phantom Edit and it does in fact make the movie quite a lot better(but I liked it before hand anyway), its amazing how much Jar Jar Binks brings down that movie. But in the case of fan movies, they seem like the younger, better looking brother of the maimed child that is fan fiction. When you think about the idea of fan fiction, you could relate it to remakes of movies or sequels of any kind of media that wasn't made by the original writer. But yet, some where down the line it goes astray, and that's being nice about it. It's more the case of going so far away from the original intention of the author and barging off the road and into a poorly written smut scene. Fan movies tend to vere away from this as you have to actually physically put quite a lot of effort into it, not to say that writing a fan fiction doesn't take effort but a fan movie isn't exactly something you make on the spur of the moment, a lot of planning is usually behind it.

Overall, liked the lecture. And the movie at the end was amazingly well done but not in the regards to the whole mobile phone idea and I don't see how holding a camera up to text is such an amazing achievement (al though it is true mobile phone cameras are awful I don't think they're THAT bad). But it did seem the original film maker 'cheated' at times, some of the words were hand written but that doesn't really mean much when it gets its message across.