Well it’s been a year since I wrote that letter wondering what University life would actually be like. Reading back on what you wrote, it’s safe to say that my ability to write a letter certainly hasn’t improved, its still as bad and unprofessional. You assumed that this year will of involved making new friends and being independent and that has definitely happened. I feel much more of an adult than before and even my parents have noticed the change in me when I have been home, saying not only do I look older but also I act older and mature.
My personality trait of being bubbly, upbeat and cheerful has helped me to settle in with new people and even better in my studies. I have made a lot of friends on my course and everybody is easy to get along with and everybody is willing to help each other if anybody needs help, which is nice to know that someone is there for you to seek advice from and not be afraid to ask for it. That was something that you concerned about in the previous letter, not being confident enough to ask someone for help. One problem resolved. I definitely don’t rely on my parents as much as I used to. I feel more like an adult and don’t look forward to going home as much as this is now home to me.
You outlined the fact that university is not just meant for fun, but for work, as you did a lot of it to get here and it would be a shame to throw it all away now. I feel that I’ve done a good amount of work and have balanced my work and social life well.
Reviewing my wishes on the previous letter, about hoping to better both my theory and practical skills, I can now say that after a year, I have improved both dramatically as we have had a balanced amount of both areas. I have really enjoyed the practical side to the course. It has been fun yet educational at the same time. And the module I am doing now which focuses on the roles in a TV Studio, I think this is an area I am going to wish to focus and build my learning around for my career aspects and future jobs/work experience.
After a year, I think the next two will be as valuable to me and will prove to be challenging yet exciting. Fingers crossed you manage to stay as focused as you are now as the next two years are going to be much more difficult and topic focused. But still, enjoy yourself and don’t be scared of anything.
‘Run Papa Run’, a Hong Kong film, was released in 2008 and was directed by Sylvia Chang. The movie is based on a novel written by Benny Li.
It has a numerous amount of styles that are easily identifiable in the film. It holds aspects of comedy, melodrama, gangster and thriller.
The film focuses on a leader of a gang, who tries to conceal his identity from his daughter. It follows the life of the family and how long the truth is hidden from the daughter, with us the audience knowing that it will all end badly, as most things do when you leave things for a long time and ignore the truth. I found the narrative very simple to follow and I found myself being able to relate to the characters as it is always a worry for parents for their children to know the truth when it contains such huge danger. Taking on a similar genre to the previously watched film Shinjinku Incident – I was expecting similar – a film where there was a lot of violence to be seen.
Out of all the films I viewed, in my opinion it was the best one as it was easy to relate to and included several genre elements. It was an easy watch film despite the thrilling and gangster parts to it. The film was also occasionally humorous which worked really well as it complimented the seriousness of the film well. Definitely one of the best.
Above, is a map showing my hometown, Middlesbrough. I have pinpointed and placed place marks of my favourite places and important places in the area. I chose to create my map based on my town as not many people I have met since moving to Coventry for university have not even heard of where I am from never the less been. I have highlighted places which played a huge part in my life whilst living there, including my schools, outside of school activities and the town’s most important places. I firstly started off at my house. The route on which I would then take people on was a difficult one to make as there was so many places I would like for people to see. I decided to take them on a typical daily route I would take into town. This would mean that I could include a lot of places I visit on nights and days as most things are so close to each other in the centre of Middlesbrough, near the town centre. As it was essential for us to include photographs in our map, I chose to use photographs showing the place as a whole as well as photographs of me and my friends in the particular place. This way I am varying my photographs and offering people who view my map see what I have previously done at that place.
During the process of producing this map, I encountered several problems. The first, was drawing lines on roads to show a route. As simple as it is, I made a bit of a pigs ear of it all. After numerous attempts and a bit of help from my course mates, I finally got my desired route onto the map. Another problem I had was getting my photographs onto the place mark. The URL’s i was entering were not functioning properly from the online sharing website, Photobucket, and the only option I could think of was to upload them all individually via another online sharing website, TinyPic. This was very time consuming and frustrating but that was the only way the photographs were going to upload onto the place mark successfully.
After a few glitches to the start of the task, I have actually thoroughly enjoyed this task. It was something different and something I was not aware I could do before. It is something I would recommend others to do and a good way of presenting someone a little mini guide of their hometown.
In yesterdays lecture we focused on how media is becoming more and more focused on the individual. The semantic web, which publishes pages that can be associated with the data they put up, is beginning to take a strong control. As we all know, our computers now, can remind us when friends birthdays and events that are coming up which are important to us, however, now they are designing computers which learn about previous data we have looked at and for example suggest to us birthday presents to buy for friends and family, based on what we have previously searched for on the internet.
The main question that arose in the lecture was ‘what will the future really be like?’. Will technology allow us to make our own decisions and live our life normally or will every aspect of our life be decided by a machine and technology? The following video is an interesting watch and an insight of what the future may be like for us…
Shinjuku Incident, released in 2009 in Hong Kong, stars Jackie Chan, directed by Derek Yee is an action and crime drama film.
The one word I would tag with this film is ‘violence’. There is a hell of a lot of the stuff. The film focused on action yet focused on the drama genre a little bit more, giving off more emotions in the characters.
The film focuses around an illegal immigrant (Chan) who goes to Japan to find his girlfriends. After he learns and discovers that she is married to a high status boss, he undergoes a lot of crime and violence – which is when we start to see the blood.
Due to the explicit nature of the violence scenes the film was eventually banned in China. The director decided against the idea of altering the film and removing the violent scenes, allowing the ban to be lifted, as he said it would ruin the film.
In conclusion, the film was very violent and gruesome. It was a good film to watch but in my opinion the violence was a bit too much. Jackie Chan played his character really well, but I would of preferred to watch him in one of his signature roles.
The third Coventry Conversation I attended involved a director of the BBC called Jana Bennett. She spoke about her visions of the future of the BBC. She started off in the BBC and she talked to us about audience needs and interests and how to fulfil them.
As the BBC is one of the most viewed television channels it is important that every audience need is met to keep audience viewings high. She discussed the different BBC channels and how they are specialised to satisfy the different audience types. For example, BBC2 is aimed more at factual viewers and BBC 3 is dedicated to 16-34 year olds, showing programmes such as Gavin and Stacey.
Jana Bennet told us how the BBC’s audiences are constantly changing due to the different ways people can watch them, for example on the internet via BBC iPlayer. As this conversation mainly focused on the BBC industry and the different channels, it interested me as it could be something I have to consider in the future.
Mackenzie Thorpe’s art work has always been a strong interest of mine. Just yesterday, me and my dad were looking at his new additions to his 2010 collection. After viewing them I thought I would share some of my favourites on my blog and tell you what it is exactly that I love about his work. Mackenzie Thorpe was born in my hometown, Middlesbrough so he is a ‘local lad’. He attended my local Art College (Clevelabd College of Art and Design) andtwo years later left to go and study a fine arts degree at the Byam Shaw College of Art in London. After graduation, Mackenzie was motivated to provide a better evironment for his children to grow up in and therefore returned to his family in the North East. Where, he set up Arthaus, a gallery in Richmond, North Yorkshire.
His works are associated with a principle of “Art from the heart” – combining tenderness with fervency through his abstract depictions of animals and children. Most of his reflects his childhood and his experiences of growing up in Middlesbrough.
Here are some of his work which I particularly love…
As part of last week’s workshop we had the opportunity to work with another online visualisation tool called ‘Many Eyes’, which turned data from a table into a visualisation, for example a bar chart or pie chart, which presented the initial data we input. To get to grips with the tool we got given the task of carrying out a research experiment and then inputting the data found in order to produce one of the visualisations. This was our second designated task that we had to carry out. I decided on choosing the topic of how long all of us spend on all the different types of media, for example, how long we spend on the internet and watch television. I surveyed 15 people and how long they usually spend on each activity in a typical day of theirs. I considered the different ways on how I could collect research for my experiment. I considered making a Facebook Group Page dedicated to the experiment and invite 15 people whom I am friends with to gain feedback. However, in the end I chose not to use this idea as there was risks like people not replying and not wishing to take part. Instead, I chose to use the hands on approach and ask people face to face. This way I would be able to receive feedback quickly and if people did not wish to take part, I would be able to seek new participants straight away. To make my research unbiased I asked people of all ages, some students and some not, some on my course and some who aren’t. I input all my found data into a table on Microsoft Excel and the end table after collecting my results looked like this below.
I then placed the data I collected onto the online visualisation tool, Many Eyes. I chose to visualise my data as a Pie Chart as most people know and understand how a pie chart shows data and therefore it would be an easy way to show how long people usually spend on the activity. This is what my final visualisation looks like:
Problems
There was only one particular problem I experienced when carrying out this task. This was when it came to inputting my table of research into Many Eyes, it didn’t recognise the format of the table and therefore none of the tools would create a visualisation. My initial table showed each individuals data. I had to change this format and instead show the 15 participants results as a collective group for the visualisation tool to work as it would be too time consuming to create 15 different pie charts for each individual. After putting the results in as a whole and altering the layout of the table about five times, it finally worked when it came to creating a visualisation.
My overall thought of the online visualisation tool, Many Eyes, is that it is very fussy with what data is needed in order to produce the visualisation. I often found that the visualisations I wanted to use could not be produced with the data I had and got very confused as to what I needed in order to produce them. Despite having these problems, I think the overall idea of Many Eyes and what it has to offer, it is a very good tool in order to create visualisations from raw data. If I had to do this task again, I would possibly have an equal balance of students and non students, for example, working adults. This way I would get a lot of different data as most people I asked were students, despite the odd two older members of my family, and it is very biased and unrepresentative as a lot of students spend most of their time on the computer due to their work load and social networking. As a whole, this task has been different and interesting. It has made me aware of tools that I had never heard before. Although due to the problems I experienced numerously on Many Eyes, I probably won’t opt to use it in the future.
For Task One we had to take photographs based around ‘visualising statistics of my life’. As we are focusing on the convergence of media in this module, I decided to base my photographs on how much media I consume in a day and even in a week. This would therefore include Internet, TV, Music, Film, Books, Gaming, my phone and my camera. As the title of the task is ‘visualising statistics about my life’, I have decided to include in every photograph a statistic about my use on each of the objects. I took careful consideration into where I would place the text stating the statistic. This is because i didn’t want the object to overpower the statistic as well as the other way round. However, in some photographs I have purposely made it so either the statistic or image is overpowering the other to make it obvious to the viewer how often I use the media object. To edit the photos, I used the editing programme Photoshop. I thoroughly enjoyed doing the editing part of the task as I liked using Photoshop before and allowed me to experiment with the photographs and how they came out. My favourite photograph is the one showing my iPod or the one showing a small collection of my DVD’s. This is because the statistic is secretly hidden on the spine of the DVD’s. I liked this idea because it wasn’t a statistic I was particularly proud of – it showed me I spend far too much time watching films instead of other productive things! Overall, I think my collection of photographs went really well and I am pleased with how they turned out. The experimentation with Photoshop built up my confidence and made me feel a lot more confident on the programme.
On week 3, in the lecture we were introduced to n artist called Chris Jordan, who is best known for his work which depicts mass consumption and waste, on a big scale. His photographs are often created by ‘garbage’. People sometimes find his unsettling and confusing. The basic message he awnts to put across from his work is about individuals unconscious behaivour in which we carry out in our everyday live. The intent of making the viewers think about their actions is successful as we all often question our habits after viewing the photographs. Here are some of my faourite from his collection.
Prison Uniforms, 2007
This depicts the 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world.
Dog and Cat Collars, 2009
This depicts ten thousand dog and cat collars, equal to the average number of unwanted dogs and cats euthanized in the United States every day.
Former Boro, Man U and England centre back Gary Pallister is looking forward to Boro's 4th Round FA Cup clash with Sunderland on Sunday. Pally is hoping that Tony Mowbray can lead us to a famous victory at the Stadium of Light.
Boro fans travelling to the Stadium of Light on club coaches this Sunday have been issued with detailed travel advice to avoid delays and make the journey to Sunderland as smooth as possible.
