Via Salon.com, I found a blurb about a viral video for the Obama campaign. I checked out the video, and I was quite impressed. The production qualities are high, which is what seemed to impress Salon. But that’s not what got me excited enough to blog about it; what impressed me was how authentically YouTube this video was. This isn’t some political hackery saying “me too!” to the Facebook generation. This video gets it.
One of the great, if not the greatest, creative strategies of online animations and videos is to take a work of mainstream culture and rework it, commenting on it, distorting it, and appropriating it. This is a dominant cultural logic of “hip” entertainment today (I have to put “hip” in quotes because I’m too old to use it legitimately).
I’ve been reflecting recently on the Johnny Chung Lee phenomenon. As probably anyone reading this already knows, Lee is the Ph.D. student at CMU whose work in HCI has gone viral. For example, his head tracking trick for the Wii has been viewed on YouTube, as of now, 1.6 million times.
What has struck me most about this is the sheer number of people–friends, former and current students, even family members–who have sent me links to his videos over the past several months. As far as my inbox is concerned, he’s outgunned the Numa Numa kid. I realized that he has probably touched (directly at least) more people in HCI than perhaps anyone ever has via CHI.
So, the fun thing about technology and the availability to the average person is their ability to create “stuff.” We talked in class about viral videos and game videos and anything else you can do with youtube and other online places that create networks.
So my question is, wtf is Britney Spears still making money when there are people like this out there.
On a happier note, this chick rocks and if you haven’t heard any of her stuff check her out. It will blow your mind what an amateur with a web cam can pull off. Puts a lot of “real” music people to shame in my opinion. http://www.youtube.com/user/MarieDigby
I’d like to give an example for the last class stuff. During last class I came across one thing; it is about EMOTICON. Emoticon is usually using for instant messaging or email infinitely. As well as some service providers offer a service that converts emoticon expressions into graphic images. In addition, on word-processing program, Ms word provides this service: if I enter “:-)”, it is replaced with ☺.
In the case of instant messaging, a sender inputs a message like “Thank you:-)“ and sends it as a meaning for appreciation and smile emotional expression. The message is delivered to an intended recipient who knows that meaning and could get it. I think that the genre for this is a type to exchange emotion through a combination of symbols and characters as a sort of language. The code of this is that the shape of the combination of symbols looks like a real image or an expression of face. Therefore, I think this phenomenon that the composition of symbols become as a language in computer usage is one of the results, which are reflected in aspect of phenomenology.
I also realized an interesting thing that emoticons are different in every culture area. In the western culture, emoticons lie on their side and express emotion with a shape of the mouth.
Examples
“-)” or ” ” Smile or Happy
“:-(” or “:(” Frown or Sad
“;-)” or “;)” Winking
“:-D” or “:D” Open-mouthed smile - a grin, often denoting laughter
“:-C” or “:C ” Very, very sad
“D-:” or “D:” Annoyed, mad, shocked or scared.
“:-p” or “:p” or ” “or “:-Þ” Smile with tongue out - used to denote either a “raspberry” or being ‘tongue in cheek’ in English
“:-S” or “:S” Being confused
“:-/” or “:/” or “:-\” or “:\ ” Doubtful or slightly confused expression
“:-|” or “:|” Blank expression
“:O” Suprised or shocked
In the eastern culture, emoticons express emotion by a shape of eyes.
Examples
(^_^) (^^) (^-^) (^o^) Smile or Happy
(*_*) Surprised or shocked
(;_ (T_T) Sad or cry
(@_@) Doubtful or slightly confused expression
(-_-) Blank expression
This following video, Emoticoncert, shows a slice of culture of emoticon usage
Quake may be the historical parent of machinima, but Halo arguably popularized and assisted with the creation of one of the first (maybe the first) large and active machinima communities. Machinima historians (they exist, right?) can probably chart the maturation of machinima filmaking using the Halo series as a recurring example. As each game was released, the complexity of the graphics and physics engines combined with the inclusion of machinima friendly video capturing tools increased the accessibility and utility of Halo as a machinima platform.
The release of Halo 3 brings about a new wave of machinima with an increased technical capacity (more prims) that affords the machinima producer more expressive capabilities as well as a richer visual language. The following videos are among the most popular at a major Halo 3 machinima site.
Currently, the videos are fairly “primitive” in their plot/story/content. The vast majority of Halo 3 videos record crazy kill shots or break downs in the game engine. This was the case with the previous Halo releases. Stories will come with time. However, the level of “professionalism” of the cuts, camera work, titling, voice overs, etc are better than previous generations of Halo machinima. I’ll venture a guess and say that the audience is getting better at producing films (largely because they’ve had a chance to consume so many and reflect on the good and bad qualities of the genre) and the technology is enabling better access to the video footage.
Hopefully that was a good enough attempt at intellectual muster to justify three cool Halo videos. Note: It does not require much muster to justify said videos given the extreme nature of their coolness.
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Amateur Video, Leisure, Politics | 
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Posted by jeffreybardzell
” Smile or Happy
“or “:-Þ” Smile with tongue out - used to denote either a “raspberry” or being ‘tongue in cheek’ in English
(T_T) Sad or cry
