Video Project Script

This is the script for our video project so far.

Scene 1: Person 1 walks in.

Scene 2: Person 1 walks partly off screen & Person 2 opens the door & enters.

Scene 3: Person 2 walks partly off screen & Person 3 clutches the door frame & enters.

Scene 4: Close up side view of all 3 of our faces & shoulders. Still shot starts to pan to behind our heads.

Scene 5: Shot of us walking away straight ahead in the dark with music playing.

Scene 6: Hand reaches to open the door.

Scene 7: A bird’s eye view of the 3 of us entering through the door.

Scene 8: A behind the back & overhead shot of each of the 3 of us working on our computers.

Cesar: Dude! Let me show you that hot chick that added me on Facebook!

Justin: Man! There’s no hot chick that would ever add you on Facebook!

Winston: It’s probably some dude that’s trying to stalk you!

Scene 9: Cesar points out something wrong with his computer thinking that it’s a possible virus.

Cesar: Dude! What the fuck’s going on with my screen?!

Justin: What the hell?!

Winston: Man! I’ve never seen anything like that before!

Scene 10: Cesar notices that the issue is dying down so we both brush him off & return back to our computers.

Scene 11: Cesar leaves his computer to go get something.

Cesar: Alright guys! I’m going on a hot date right now! I’ll see you two loners later tonight!

Justin: Don’t you mean cyberdate?!

Winston: Yeah with that chick from Facebook!

Scene 12: Shot of Cesar’s laptop screen which shows a virus.

Scene 13: Shot of Winston & Justin working.

Scene 14: Cesar comes back & notices that his computer is a little off.

Justin: Cesar, aren’t you supposed to be on your date right now?

Winston: Yeah, where’s your cyberhottie at?

Cesar then twitches & speaks strangely for a split second. Justin & Winston look at Cesar & then look at each other for a second.

Cesar while twitching & pausing: She…is…reformatting…her…hard…drive…

Cesar then walks off screen.

Justin: Dude did you notice that?

Winston: Yeah he’s acting kind of weird.

Scene 15: A shot of the screen video of the modification of Cesar’s files & the deletion.

Scene 16: Winston & Justin notice that their computers are going through the same thing, but they ignore it so they just pack up & go home.

Scene 17: Cesar is at home checking out his computer & on Facebook on his cyberdate’s page. The virus starts to take over & his body starts twitching & he speaks strangely.

Scene 18: A screen video shot.

Scene 19: Cesar calls Winston & Justin on their cell phones & requests to meet them at the park.

Cesar: Can you meet me at the park?

Winston & Justin simultaneously: Ok see you there Cesar.

Scene 20: A shot of Cesar waiting at the park & a pan to a shot of Winston & Justin arriving at the park to meet Cesar.

Justin: What’s up Cesar? What’s wrong?

Cesar while twitching & pausing: Who wants…to play…lightsaber duel?

Winston: Cesar, what’s going on man? You’ve been acting weird lately & me & Justin are worried about you.

Justin: Yeah man, I’ve seen you twitching & speaking funny like you’re a robot or something.

Winston: You sound like a Terminator man.

Scene 21: Cesar gets offended.

Cesar: What the fuck are you guys talking about?! I’m not a robot or a goddamn Terminator!

Justin: Cesar, calm down! We’re not trying to offend you.

Winston: We’re just worried about you that’s all.

Cesar while twitching & speaking unusually: I don’t need your help! To hell with you guys!

Scene 22: Cesar punches Winston. Justin then watches in horror as Winston goes flying backwards. Justin then turns back to Cesar with that look of horror on his face & Cesar delivers the same punch that sends Justin flying backwards.

Scene 23: Winston & Justin are on the ground trying to collect themselves because they can’t believe that Cesar just punched them so hard that they went flying backwards.

Justin: Oh shit!

Winston: Dude there’s definitely something wrong with him!

Justin: Let’s get outta here!

Winston: Shit! Wait for me!

Scene 24: Winston & Justin run out of the building.

Cesar: Hey! Where do you think you 2 are going?!

Scene 25: Cesar gets mad & quickly follows Justin & Winston.

Scene 26: A bird’s eye view of the chase.

Scene 27: Fight scene between Cesar vs Justin & Winston.

Scene 28: Cesar puts his hands on our foreheads & we twitch like he does after he kicks both our asses.

Scene 29: All 3 of us wake up at the same time to the same screen.

Cesar: Dude! I just had the craziest dream!

Justin: Are you serious?! I think I had the same dream too!

Winston says to Cesar: I dreamt that you were trying to kill us!

Cesar: Man! That’s crazy! Let’s go get some coffee to keep us awake.

Justin: I’m down.

Winston: Let’s do it.

Scene 30: A shot of all 3 of us walking out the door with the virus infecting all 3 of our computer screens simultaneously.

End Credits

Winston's 10 Favorite Links

Google - - a search engine that made two guys from Stanford Billionaires Yahoo - - a search engine that made two guys from Stanford Billionaires MSN - - a search engine that made two guys from Stanford Billionaires Youtube - - a great place to see your favorite videos Myspace - - a social online networking site Facebook - - a social online networking site San Jose State University - - our hometown Zero One San Jose - - seven days of art and interconnectivity Craigslist - - great place to find and sell stuff Internet Production and Performance - - great class to learn how to develop your Internet skills

Video Project

For our video project, my role was to find a video on Youtube that shows a fake virus which we will incorporate as part of the virus scene where our computers become infected & Cesar's personality becomes very robotic.

Video Project

So far, the plot of our project involves Cesar contracting a computer virus on his laptop. Soon enough, it consumes his body affecting his behavior & mannerisms which make him very robotic like. Slowly but surely, he gains access to mine & Justin's personal information & chases us down & tries to kill us. Cesar then wakes up & realizes that it was all a dream. This story is a work in progress right now. The introduction of the characters in the video will be somewhat reminiscent of The Matrix with the chase scenes heavily inspired by the movies, Crank & Crank: High Voltage. The soundtrack of our video will incorporate music from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, The Matrix soundtrack, Crystal Method's song Get Busy Child.

Expose Yourself: Technology

Blu-ray Drives in PCs? Fuggetaboutit.

Blu-ray may have a future in the living room, but its prospects in the PC market appear bleak. A new study by market researcher iSuppli shows that only 3.6 percent of PCs this year will ship with Blu-ray high-definition optical drives, a figure that will rise to just 16.3 percent by 2013.

Why the sluggish adoption rate? Michael Yang, an iSuppli senior analyst, says that consumers can’t find a compelling reason to pay extra for a Blu-ray drive, in part because of the anemic selection of Blu-ray movies.

Yang makes some valid points, and I doubt that Blu-ray drives will ever become standard equipment in consumer PCs, even after 2013. Consumer PCs, particularly notebooks and netbooks, simply don’t need Blu-ray. Here’s why:

HD movies are wasted on small laptop screens: Notebooks outsell desktops, and notebooks have relatively small screens. (A 17-inch display qualifies as a big-screen experience on a laptop.) Blu-ray’s HD brilliance is lost on a laptop screen. The format is best suited to a home theater setupHDTV. with a 50-inch or larger

Living room Blu-ray players are cheap: Some Blu-ray fans might argue that consumers could stream Blu-ray movies from their laptops to their big screen TVs. (An HDMI connection would work too.) Yes, they could, but they probably won’t. Most folks would rather spend $200 for a Blu-ray player for the living room.

Blu-ray isn’t a great backup drive: Blu-ray’s storage capacity may be impressive, but who wants to back up a massive hard drive to a stack of discs? It’s easier to buy an external hard drive, which is dirt cheap these days, or to use an online backup service.

Optical drives will soon be extinct: Quick, when’s the last time you used your DVD drive? Mine has sat idle for months. If I need to install software, I download the program. Shrink-wrapped apps are going away. The MacBook Air ditched the optical drive, and nearly all netbooks have too. I’m sure the users of those portables are fine with that. The DVD drive will soon go the way of the floppy. Fast forward to 2013, and most notebooks won’t have an optical drive at all. Improvements in broadband speeds will make movie downloading/streaming commonplace.

Blu-ray won’t vanish entirely, of course. But it’ll be little more than a niche peripheral that appeals to a small segment of the market.

Contact Jeff Bertolucci via Twitter (@jbertolucci) or at jbertolucci.blogspot.com.

Winston's Thoughts

I chose this article because it fascinates me as I have little knowledge of Blu-ray.

Expose Yourself: Video

Homer³

Expose Yourself: News Article

Facebook knows too much, ACLU warns.

By Scott Duke Harris

San Jose Mercury News

Published: Thursday, Aug. 27, 2009 9:00 p.m. MDT

E-mail story

It's easy. Send a link to the story you were just reading to a friend. Just fill out the form on this page and we'll send it along.

Your name and e-mail address are transmitted to the recipient. Otherwise, it is considered private information; see Privacy policy.

E-mail address of recipient
(Only one address please; multiple addresses are not supported)

Name of recipient

Your e-mail address

Your name

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Privacy advocates have long warned that users of Facebook and other social networks who seek amusement from quizzes like "What Simpsons Character Are You?" might be mortified by the way creators of such applications can access and potentially "scrape" personal information — not just about the quiz-takers, but their friends as well.

Now, engaging in some online jujitsu, the ACLU of Northern California is employing a cautionary Facebook quiz of its own to illustrate how quizzes that may seem "perfectly harmless" can release an array of data to the wider world — including users' "religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, photos, events, notes, wall posts, and groups."

The app, titled "What Do Facebook Quizzes Know About You?" delivers its answer by opening a window that scrolls biographical data, attributed comments and photos.

More than 8,000 participants have taken the ACLU's quiz since it was quietly released a few days ago, the ACLU said Wednesday. The group hopes to prompt Facebook to upgrade its privacy default settings for its users, now numbering more than 250 million.

One helpful upgrade, the civil liberties group said, would be for Facebook to "change default privacy settings so that quizzes and other third-party applications run by a user's friends do not have access to the information on a user's profile without the user's opt-in consent."

Facebook users considering such applications as quizzes typically see a page that provides a choice of "Allow" or "cancel." The boilerplate language notes that allowing access "will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work." But many Facebook users ignore the warning or don't comprehend the potential risks, the ACLU said.

Facebook, which boasts of building its success on creating an online environment users trust, said Wednesday that it has been actively policing its service in recent days and has disabled hundreds of applications, including some quiz apps, found to be inconsistent with Facebook policies.

The company also pointed out that it recently simplified user privacy settings. The final question of the ACLU quiz enables users to visit the Facebook page where they can alter their settings.

"We generally agree with their recommendations and have already made public announcements about relevant changes that are under way," said Barry Schnitt, Facebook's director of policy communications.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based service has been buffeted by criticism from a variety of privacy advocates, and in some cases has found ways to resolve complaints. "We've also had productive discussions with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner about improving user data controls on Platform," Schnitt said. "We'd be glad to also have productive discussions with the ACLU and generally catch them up, too."

Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart told reporters Thursday, "The changes Facebook plans to introduce will allow users to control the types of personal information that applications can access."

Facebook said the entire process would take up to a year to implement. Chris Conley, a technology fellow with the ACLU, said creating a Facebook quiz seemed an apt means for spreading word about privacy risks inherent in such apps. "We wanted to use Facebook itself to show how all these quiz creators have access to personal information," said Conley, a former software engineer at Intel who coded the quiz.

It is difficult to know how third-party app developers use the data, which can be collected and sold for marketing and advertising campaigns, Conley said. Private investigators and political entities are known to create dossiers using technologies that automatically scour the Web. An individual bombarded by spam, for example, may have been targeted because of an affiliation posted on Facebook. "There is no way to know," Conley said.

The text of ACLU's quiz put it in ominous terms: "Once details about your personal life are collected by a quiz developer, who knows where they could end up or how they could be used. Shared? Sold? Turned over to the government?"

The group acknowledged the irony of its approach: "We know it's a little weird to warn you about Facebook quizzes by asking you to take a Facebook quiz — but at least you know who we are and that we have a real privacy policy that we're committed to upholding. Can you say the same for every unknown author of every quiz you or your friends take?"

Many Facebook quizzes have been created with templates from LOLapps, a San Francisco startup that enables users to create their own quizzes. It has also written its own quizzes, including such popular ones as "Which Sex and the City Character Are You?" and "What Type of Heart Do You Have?"

Winston's Thoughts

I took an interest to this article because I for one, have a Facebook account and I do spend a lot of time on it, especially taking those so called "harmless" quizzes. I have also noticed that many of the advertisements on the top and the side of the page are directed specifically towards my personal interests that I have listed on my profile.

Expose Yourself: New Media Art

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

• Attachments:1

Added by Anonymous, last edited by Anonymous on Feb 15, 2007 (view change)

Vectorial Elevation, 1999

Technologies: 18 robotic 7kW xenon searchlights, 4 webcams, TCP/IP to DMX converter, Java 3D interface, GPS tracker, linux web and e-mail servers.

Keywords: public, spectacle, telepresence

---

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the doomsday scenarios that many anticipated?from Biblical Armageddon to Y2K computer malfunctions?failed to materialize. Mexican-born artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer satisfied an otherwise unquenched thirst for spectacle by placing eighteen robotic searchlights around Mexico City's Zócalo, the world's third-largest urban square. In Vectorial Elevation, an ambitious new media art project that was first presented in Mexico City to celebrate the new millennium, participants used a Web-based interface to control the searchlights, choreographing patterns on the night sky and the urban landscape. Lozano-Hemmer calls this type of performance "Relational Architecture," which he defines as "the technological actualization of buildings with alien memory." In other words, laypeople and passersby (who possess the "alien" memories of outsiders) can construct new meanings for edifices, usually via technological tools -- such as Internet software and robotic lights. Lozano-Hemmer cites the work of Thomas Wilfred, an artist who in the 1920s was an early innovator in light-based art works, as an influence. Wilfred invented a keyboard-like machine called the "Clavilux" to project light on New York City skyscrapers. According to Lozano-Hemmer, "light projections...can achieve the desired monumental scale, can be changed in real time, and their immateriality makes their deployment more logistically feasible."

When a participant's design for Vectorial Elevation reached the head of the Web queue, it was beamed into the sky, visible to crowds on the ground in Mexico City and, via Web cameras, to a large online audience. The searchlights were connected by data cables and calibrated by Global Positioning System trackers. More than 800,000 people from 89 countries visited the Web site in a two-week period. The light show they produced was visible within a 20-kilometer radius. When each design was executed, its maker received an email linking to an automatically-generated personal Web page displaying both photographic images and virtual renditions of the performance. Each page also featured participants' uncensored texts, ranging from dedications to political manifestos.

The project's aesthetic effect evokes that of Tribute in Light (2002), a temporary public art memorial to the victims of 9/11, by Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, who utilized vertical beams supplied by 44 searchlights placed at Ground Zero in New York to project vertical beams into the night sky above the World Trade Center's destroyed Twin Towers. Like Tribute in Light, Vectorial Elevation was hard to ignore because of its giant scale and inescapable presence. But Lozano-Hemmer describes his project as an "anti-monument" that serves primarily as a platform for public self-expression. Lozano Hemmer installed later incarnations of Vectorial Elevation in Spain, France, and Ireland, each time drawing large audiences both in the streets and online. New Media artists often make use of technologies in order to critique them. Although Lozano-Hemmer uses technologies that suggest panoptic regimes of control, Vectorial Elevation is primarily a celebration of the potential these technologies have to produce a new kind of participatory spectacle.

Winston's Thoughts

Lozano-Hemmer's Vectorial Elevation is the most inspirational of all the media projects because it reminds me of the light beams that are used for advertising car sales and movie premieres. The other interesting aspect of this project is that it is audience interactive as they can design their own light show & project it into the night sky.