Week 6 Tutorial Task

Audio-visual Presentation in Three weeks:
Week 1 -

In The beginning

We were advised that our next task was to produce an audio-visual piece over the next three weeks.  It was to have a New Communication Technology theme.  Freak Out Moment - not having any experience at this type of thing, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed.   We were told to quickly form a team.  My team mates were Tara Morgan and Crystal Ginn.  Tara, indicated she felt the same way ie where to start.   We had no idea what Crystal, our other team member, knew or how she'd feel.

Initial Meeting

At the initial meeting, that day in the tutorial class, of our three member project team, there were only two of us present.  Not a problem - probably makes the group dynamic a lot easier to manage.

Getting Focused

We thought a good place to start was to discuss what we were passionate about.  What we'd like to achieve using our blogs and the internet.  We started brainstorming and doing a few random internet searches.  Within minutes we found we were both concerned about privacy issues relating to internet sites.  Our concerns were based around the premise that Terms of Service / Use to all internet sites were rarely read, let alone understood and usually signed away the user's rights.  Tara was also interested in the Filter Bubble theory, as was I.

From there, our conspiracy theory background story just evolved.  Based on the idea that major search engines were keeping tabs on us and our internet use, we formulated the concept of a central committee of mega-rich technology moguls out to control the information world and all access to it.  We were building a story around the massive growth in the use of the internet world wide and thought a good way to start was to show the relevant statistics.  I was taking sketchy notes throughout, to nut out later.

We discussed this with our tutor who gave us some interesting background information on conspiracy theories and internet activism.  We also touched on the idea of creating a Facebook page to establish another dimension to our piece.

Production Tools

We had no experience making films, videos or sound recordings to date, so we decided that we'd keep things simple.   Tara said she would be able to put something together using powerpoint.

Basic Concept

The obvious thing to do was to find information and images from the internet and put it together as a presentation of our conspiracy theory story about the need to read and understand Terms of Use before signing, otherwise we'd lose control over our intellectual freedom.

Creative Input

At this stage we had no creative input of our own to contribute.

Copyright and Defamation Problems

During the tutorial, our tutor did thoroughly discuss Creative Commons and explained about it's use and how we could use images and music for our piece.  In retrospect I now understand what we were supposed to be focusing on, at the time we were not in a position to consider any of these matters at this stage, as we didn't really know what we were doing.

Creative Commons provides tools that allow work to be placed as much as possible in the public domain.  The work is for public use as long as it is correctly attributed and complies with the levels of copyright attached to the image or audio.   But this would become clearer as the weeks wore on.  At this stage we were taking note of anything related to copyright that we could find but were not noting or setting it out in the correct format. 


Process

I did a search for World Internet Usage and immediately found the information I needed.  From that I came up with the idea of using images to introduce the continents.  We thought the statistics could be flashed over the images and have some music in the background.

I was to continue to find geographical / continent images and Tara would search for board room images. As Tara knew that Crystal was studying music, we thought we'd leave the music to her.

These were our tasks till we met again the following week.


References:


Creative Commons Australia,  http://creativecommons.org.au/    viewed 31 August 2011.
Free Digital Photos, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/  viewed 31 August 2011.
World Internet Stats ,  http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm   viewed 31 August 2011.