Be Concerned

During the early stages of this project we thought of a lot of different people who we could interview. While we were sifting through dozens of potential document subjects that we did not personally, our dear friend Karim Doumar, who was a local journalist, gave Aidan a call. As the phone sat in front of us buzzing away, our eyes grew double in sized. We looked at each other, both thinking the same thing, why weren’t we doing a project about someone like Karim who was someone we knew that was actually making a difference in their community. I guess it never occurred to us that someone we knew personally could be making such a big difference in their community. So we sent our documentary crew on down to Berkeley, California to find out who our friend Karim Doumar really was and how he was making a difference in his community. Once in Karim Doumar’s backyard, we immediately got to work on uncovering this exciting story. First, we found out a little about what Doumar does for the community. We thought this was the most important thing to start off with because it gave us an idea as to why he does the things he does which is what we did second. We found out why he writes for the specific newspaper he does and why he writes for any newspaper at all. As you can see in the video, Doumar is so passionate about his newspaper because it is free and is helping all members of the community, not just the affluent one. He also does this job for free because it is something he is passionate about. We finally found out how what he is doing is actually making a difference, which you can see in the video. As you can see Citizen Doumar is being a great influence in his community and is obviously very concerned. An outside media source that was very influential in the making of this documentary was Spotlight because we’d like to think that Doumar is headed in the right direction in breaking national news. In the reading for this assignment, Goldbard talks about the right that everyone has “to participate in the cultural life of the community”. We felt that Doumar was not only acting upon this right but also allowing others to more easily have this right by providing everyone with the local newspaper for free.

https://youtu.be/9-D5rqgJaUU

The Slopes

                  The social issue I addressed in this game was the idea that people aren’t taking enough care of the environment and this is a direct response to people not spending enough time outdoors. I think this is the case because if people were to spend more time with nature and become closer to it, they would grow to love it enough to want to preserve it and take care of it. The idea for this game came from a combination of a few different things. First off it came from my own personal fears of losing the winter and not being able to ski as much but also from the fear of damaging our environment. I also picked the idea of becoming one with nature from watching The Revenant which addresses a lot of issues relating to becoming one with nature and man vs. nature. Outside sources that I used when preparing for this project included an article published by NASA discussing the issue of Global climate change that can be found here, http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/. I then did research on how humans are causing this global warming and found out a lot of evidence from this website https://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming.htm. Then lastly I researched how to fight global warming by researching it on Natural Resources Defense Council, http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/gsteps.asp. What I found was one of the biggest issues with global warming was that people believe global warming is an issue, no one is really doing anything about it. Although media often addresses the issue of preserving our environment, I think the audiences often chooses to do nothing and just wait around which is only making the problem worse. I addressed this problem by making those who chose to do nothing, end up down a road where they can do nothing and it drives them crazy.

                  How I got people engaged in playing this game was by relating it to something enjoyable but first making them work for it. Since they thought they eventually would be able to ski they continued to play. Although it became somewhat frustrating at times, they still would continue to play at the hopes of eventually skiing. The sad thing was that once they eventually did ski they did not have a good time because all the snow was melted. I tried to relate my own frustrations of the affects global warming has on skiing in making this game.

http://philome.la/BossTweed7/the-slopes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrCRIKb8PtY

I think Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is an amazing movie for several reasons. As it pertains to this assignment, I want to discuss its environment. There is so much obvious care in the establishment of that world. I love the way Cuaron uses his camera to explore the foreground and the background of his shots. I think it was also quite prescient to establish reactionary religious cults, in the wake of destructive infertility. I considered possibilities for reactionary sects in the face of an increasingly bleak world.

This idea stuck with me. I think there is a pretty clear connection to current politics. People turn to Donald Trump and to Bernie Sanders out of desperation (though I do not mean to liken them more than is fair). This idea did not begin with any political thought, I just found it could be an interesting narrative. But I think that connection makes sense.

So for me, this weirdness was about the idea of increasing desperation. I am not totally pessimistic about the world’s prospects. I think most of our problems are solvable, but that does not mean we will make a political choice to solve them. If we do not solve the most serious ones, increased desperation will be a given and absurdities, like Donald Trump as president, will become realistic.

Science fiction has always been a medium that creatively explores and elevates realistic content. Cuaron’s film applies neatly to that. Children of Men is haunting because it makes current the sort of crisis many feel is looming. Specifically that environmental abuse will manifest in horrifying and confounding ways, and that the western neoconservative world order may collapse leaving the unknown in its place. Increasingly this project became, for me at least, an attempt to express thoughts about my world and future.

Julian Bleecker says in his article, Design Fiction, “ [Design fiction] objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, imagined or expressed…” this was important in creating the artifacts that represented our world because we focused on what aspects of this world were the most important and then created our artifacts in such a way that they could allude to the rest of the story. We also did not go into great detail or explain much of what the cult leader’s intentions were because we decided to implicitly explore them by only showing the audience bits of what he believes in and what he is actually attempting. This was important to us because we wanted the character to not seem too crazy explicitly but actually have pretty messed up intentions. This is also a political issue that is relevant in our own world, especially now during the presidential race.

SCREAM

Both of us might designate Webspinna as the most challenging assignment of this class. This is, in large part, because it demanded performance on some level. But the nature of the project also required time and meticulousness. I think that the best performances were the most obviously strategized, and intricate. The project asks for a broad sense of meaning. Some sort of conflict must take place. But these broader strokes are comprised of sonic intricacies that take time and effort to shape, like with pointillism or mosaic art. The most enabling thing for us was to have a subject that we not only love, but are well versed in. Hopefully our project made it clear that this subject is horror movies, something we have both loved since a young age. It is also a subject that has inspired us to make small horror films as well as continues to affect our work as well as what we enjoy watching. In The Ecstasy of Influence Lethem said, “one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses.” This makes horror very significant to us as we adopt as well as embrace it in our own lives.

The specific tension that informed our battle is the struggle for supremacy between slasher films, or otherwise non-fantastical horror, and horror of fantasy. The latter consists of ghost stories, some urban legends (think of It Follows), fairy tales, most science fiction, and the horror of folktale beasts like the vampire. Basically, it is The Shining and The Exorcist vs. Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Due to our shared genre affinity, there was a mutual feeling of vast material to draw from. Thus, the challenge was to filter. Filtering consisted of choosing what might add to a larger statement. We used The Goblins soundtrack from Dario Argento’s Suspiria, because the eerie breathing captured the profound eeriness of that which is supernatural. The other major source for the supernatural side was Disasterpiece’s main theme for David Mitchell’s aforementioned It Follows. This song was meant to express a sense of beauty and adventure that can be found in horror films, as opposed to the horrors of life. This was meant to underscore the idea of horror film as inherent fantasy. Art is a simulation of true emotions (I hope that is not read disparagingly, it is not meant that way), and the idea of horror based on things most people do not believe in is an important part of that conversation.