Author: Cecilia Cai

For our video project, we plan to focus on the square dance, depicting a story of a girl passing the Century avenue at dusk and saw a group of elders dancing. This is a very simple storyline for now, but we want to create different  settings with this starting, making it into a comedy, a documentary, a horror film, and an action film at the same time. The development of this film would be  different according to its genres, for instance, for a comedy setting, we can have the girl joining the elders’ group and make friends with some of them.

We plan to present the story from first-person prospective, not showing the face of the main character, and instead presenting what he/she sees with the camera. We will also show the mind activities of the main character by changing her eyesight and showing surroundings in different directions, making her staring at some directions for a while occasionally. We will also make use of sound such as the sound of breathing or heart beating, so as to represent her emotions.

As for creating films of different genres and story settings, we plan to achieve this design by attaching different css filters to the video and changing the background music. We will also adapt the tempo and color tone of the video, fitting it into different settings. For instance, we can creating a horror movie with the video by attaching a dark yellow or grey filter for its base color, stretching the images of certain frames and adding some special effects, such as shaking the current frame violently or adding some splash of red dots on some frames. We can also strengthen the horror feeling by setting its background musics to be some horror musics, or adding sounds of rapid  breath and heart beats. 

For the website, we plan to design its layout as a professional Video playlist website such as YouTube and Netflix, in which the users can search for their desired video by inputing key words or selecting from the filter settings. The only corresponding video will then be available to the users. However, this will be a fake searching or filtering, as all the videos on this website begin in an identical way and are composed of same elements, with different color tone, background music, tempo, and etc., and develop into different endings. Users can experience how the similar video content would be able to present both a “horror movie in the 1920s” and a “comic in today’s setting” by changing the features mentioned above.

Of course, to gather such video element, we would need to get the consent from the elders dancing. If this does not work out, we plan to shoot a group of students practicing dancing in the dance studio at school, and present the perspective of the person came in last.

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~zc1151/commLab/AudioProject/intro.html

The above link it to our Audio project. This time, I work with Shirley to create and present a story of a man who lost his glasses trying to make a pancake. Initially, we were inspired by some cooking videos in which the host speaks nothing, and instead they amplify the sounds of the cooking process. We found watching these videos and listening to the sounds of food very comforting, and decided to record the sound of making pancakes for our project. We then started to think how this idea could be fit into a story, as well as the way to present the sounds. I recalled the Masterchef Season3 winner Christine, who has visual disability but is very talented in cooking. We watched a video of how she cooked, wondering if the sounds help. We realized that, although listening is indeed an important way for her to control her cooking, she mainly use touching, smelling, and tasting. This example then does not stand for our idea. However, we still want to find a context where the sound itself is highlighted, since people normally do not pay that much attention to merely sound itself. Therefore, we chose for the setting of a guy, nearsighted, broke his glasses and wanted to cook a pancake. We intentionally blurred the pictures, indicating that you don’t necessarily have to see clearly to enjoy cooking, since the sounds itself is very comforting.

For the visual images, we drew all the pictures. I designed the prototypes on paper while Shirley edit them on her iPad.  For the audio clips, most of them are of our own recordings, but we also made use of some clips downloaded on http://freesound.org. For those free audios online, I also edited them with Audacity before using them in our program.

I mainly worked on the coding part and audio editing. Shirley helped with setting up the structure of the introduction page. I find it a great exploration for me to work on this project, as I’ve never worked on audio itself before. I used to only be able to cut and combined audio clips with iMovie, but I played around a lot with Audacity when working on this, learning the ways to remove the environment noise, amplify the main part, change the speed and tempo, even the pitches and volume, change the far and near of the sound, and etc. I also learned to edit the detail parts, such as smoothing the transitions and removing clippings. 

I also found the programming part a bit challenging to me, as I’ve never worked with audios on javaScript before. I learned the built-in attributes, events and functions of audios by reading through the professor’s class notes and browsing tutorials on google. A problem I kept ran into is that, when I call the audio.play() function, the console return either an exception of “uncaught in promise”, or an “async” error. However, it works occasionally. I looked it up on Google, and realize that this would happen if the audio is set to play on-load, when it is not readily loaded or sync, and is due to the characteristic of the browser. To solve this problem, I changed the triggers of the audio files to be clicking on a button/image instead of directly calling “audio.play()” in onload/mouseover functions. 

I learned about tracking the current time of the audio. I initially tried to use  audio.currentTime as conditions in function, only to find that the value that it track does not update from time to time. I realized that this is because currentTime is returned only when you call to check it, and will not automatically refresh its value. I looked up on google and learned an event for an audio file called “onTimeupdate”, which continually updates the value of currentTime when the file is playing. This function is very helpful for me to create one of the feature of our project, as it helps track when to change the image, and enable me to create some simple animations. Besides this event, I also make use of the “onended” and “onplay” events to trigger some corresponding functions.

One of the most frequent function I used in the code is “setTimeOut” function. I also used “setInterval” somewhere, for creating animations according to time. By delaying the time for calling some functions, I’m able to make the audios play at proper time, corresponding to the change of the images.

Another problem I ran into is that, as the initial picture I use displays every  ingredient needed for making a pancake, I originally track the position of the mouse to decide which object the user is clicking on and set it to trigger different functions, and later I realized that, when the window is enlarged or shrank, the position of each object related to the window changes, and thus the original values I set become of no use. I later changed the tracked value of mouse position from px to percentage. And by doing this, the tracking worked, as the position of a point always changes in proportionate to the change of size of the window.

Lastly, one of the CSS tricks I used in the coding is what I learned from a YouTube tutorial video. I edited the code it shows and create a shape of eye at the beginning of the story, which blinks when the mouse is over the shape, and generate the sound of cartoonish blinking eyes when clicking on it. To create the animation, I created a span within a div, and use hover.

I really do enjoyed working on this project, as I learned a lot about sound and gained many experiences with audios. Our cooperation between partner is overall pretty smooth. Shirley mainly deals with collecting the audio and image materials, while I mainly take the responsibility of editing and putting them together and present them as a whole.

This reading presents me with two interesting counter perspectives of artists towards the copyright law, and inspires me to ponder on the appropriate role and effect of the contemporary copyright law.

The issue discussed in this article originated from a painter creating a drawing based on an existing photography artwork. The painting, as described by the painter, should not be subjected to copyright, as his interpretation of the existing photo originates entirely from his aesthetic feeling, and has noting to do with the idea and emotion that the photographer intended to express. According to him, all he used of the photo is the image element, which, in this case, is a man of unknown, and thus this practice should be equally regarded as drawing any common object in the environment, such as an apple or the natural view. This arouse a question which is later brought up by Joy, that “who owns the rights to the man’s struggle?” Clearly, Joy holds the opinion that photos are just presentation of real life subjects and events. Although the photographers are using their photos to show their emotions or tell a story to the public, audiences should have the freedom of interpreting the photo as they wishes, without being “controlled” by the photographer, neither being “forced” to accept the original emotions attached to it. This attitude  is reasonable in a sense, since photos, even if edited, largely restore the reality, depicting common assets, which are possessed by no one. Referring back to the case, no one possess an exactly correct description of how the man in the photo feels and what he is doing. Reinterpretation of the emotion of the man should not be restricted by the copyright law. After all, copyright should not ban artists from using common assets to create and innovate, especially since the recreation has nothing to do with the original design purpose. 

After reading Susan’s opinion towards this case, I am leaning towards supporting her position. It is true that photos present things in real life settings, whose contents do not belong to the photographer. But, as Susan points out, all the photos have their own context, implying different stories happening in specific time and place. Jay’s reinterpretation of the man certainly takes it out of the context, disregarding the original story and meaning. This is unfair to both Susan and the man, and do harm their benefits, for such practice disrespect the reality, and would even cause potential influences to the man’s lives. In such understanding, what copyright laws act is to secure the original author with the right to explain his or her creation, defining its initial implication. If the work, whatever format, is created in a certain context, to which the author has a strong emotional or personal attachment, he or she definitely does not want others to redefine its meaning or emotion. The copyright law thus guarantee the original author with the right of defining his or her work, protecting his or her credit and respects.

Ultimately, it is about the balance between copyright violation and appropriate recreation, and either extreme will lead to ineffectiveness of copyright laws. In current art fields, there exists many open recourses which are seen as common assets for the artists to use, encouraging creativities and innovations, while the use of copyright assets are more restrictive. One might argue that copyright law restricts creativity and innovations, but I want to argue that copyright artworks are limited while the free common assets  are much more abundant. Although copyright do lead to corruptions and commercial exploitation sometimes, their restrictions on social creativity are essentially minor. After all, experienced dancers can dance even when tangled by chains. There is also many new ideas about adjusting copyright laws, such as a type of copyright protection called CC license, which authors or artists has the initiative to define to what extent and under what context can the contents be used in other works. This is more flexible, and yet giving an even more blurred boundary. I believe the debate around copyright will constantly go on, but the most important thing is to strike the balance and find the most reasonable boundary.

This essay discusses the history and development of copyright, as well as the social definition for arts and knowledge. As there is no definite boundary between copying and original, the effectiveness of copyright laws is given by the mainstream social perception of certain periods, and thus alters as time changes. 

Lethem starts from discussing how art is created by the artists, arguing that artists create from existing works of others, reinterpreting and recreating them from their unique perspectives. In this understanding, everyone is the author, in that our understanding towards the work, either an art piece or an article, can never be identical to anyone else. Moreover, as words are translated into different languages and circulate around the globe, their meanings are likely to change overtime. And even, when the words are borrowed by some famous authors, or who became famous author later, their original author is likely to be forgotten. 

Then, what effect does copyright serves? As Lethem mentioned, it is “an ongoing social negotiation” (63). However, in older time, copyright is much more strictly defined. According to Lethem, “every creative act in a tangible medium is now subject to copyright protection” (63). Then every thing we do is subjected to copyright law. This restrict definition certainly won’t be sustainable, as digital technology develops rapidly challenge the possibility of human creations. 

The author also discuss about how gift can not be fairly measured by money as an economic product. This is because the value of the arts produced by artists’ gift can not be evaluated according to a definite standard. In fact, as every one of us has different understandings towards such arts, our experiences and gains from them also varies. As the example given by the author, we all pay for fee to get ticket for museums or concerts, but the art we experience has nothing to do with price. After all, what we gain from them are subjective to individuals, largely determined by our believes and values.

However, as the market commercializes any product that enters, arts are bind with fixed price. Lethem considers this as an abuse, as he believes that arts should be public commons which “is not possessed by anyone, not even the society as a whole”. I find it interesting to investigate the market forces behind the creation of arts. Using a current phenomenon as an example, that new media exhibitions are popping up everywhere and becoming increasingly popular. Even in commercial malls, they are easily seen. People pay decently for the ticket to enter those exhibitions, interact with the project for just a few minutes, and spend most of their time taking social media worthy pictures. Reflecting on this situation, then, does it implies that, new media exhibitions are commercialized and actually become a business product for consumption? What effects do tickets’ prices exert on new media art, or art in general?

Lastly,  Lethem discusses the contemporary copyright. He regards that “copyright today is not used to reward the labor of authors but to promote the progress of science and useful arts”. The current environment for copyright is becoming more flexible, defining copyright as the right for the original author to freely interpret his/her own work, without banning others’ from accessing or referring them. As long as the copyright holder agrees, others can make use of his/her work in certain proper ways. There is also a rising culture of open-source and remix, where people are allowed to use existing works without even citing the original authors. This lies in accordance to the social definition towards create. As we commonly perceive nowadays, as long as the idea is refreshed or renewed, even it is simply a process of interpretation or documentation, it is a kind of creation. The more inviting environment will certainly generate more innovative ideas and creations, but, as  Lethem states, one of the problem of current copyright laws lies in corruptions. Therefore, finding an effective supervising approach and striking a balance between recognizing original contributors and encouraging later creators or recreations are essentially important.