Wednesday, May 30, 2007

The Spirit of the Game

I've been trying come up with the rest of the dialogue for the game bot video that I was going to call "The Spirit of the Game" because it's based on the idea of the Ghost in the machine that there is something beyond and beneath just the programming

I'm up to the part where they want to exercise some free will to follow personal goal rather than the programmed ones they were designed for. Competing and eliminating each other in the game kinda prevents a long term relationship.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Moderation in all things

I had to upload my music video I did for MSP10 this semester to YouTube again since I got an email saying "This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Cal IV Entertainment, LLC claiming that this material is infringing:" I checked on that company and it's the agency that represents Faith Hill. They must've been upset that I used her song in my animation.



The thing is that YouTube is so scattershot in how they enforce those notifications, since I saw the actual music video with Faith Hill in it still on there and several others with that song in it. They only delete certain ones with certain tags and only on the day they get the notification from the company that doesn't like it. It's not like it does much good to stop anything.

It's not that I object to Faith Hill or Cal IV to making money of the song, but it's a bit fanatical to try and squeeze every nickel out of it that way. It's not exactly the same purpose or performance if I used it in a different way than they recorded and sold it as. If you're going to go to that extreme, than you should pay the people that came up with the words she used in the vocabulary or the notes she used for the melody since none of that was original either. After all Breathe is an 8 year old song, it's already won 3 Grammy awards and been #1 on the charts so I think they've already made all the money they're going to off of it a while ago. Trying to be tightfisted about any further use of it comes off as kinda of greedy and not appreciating any new exposure for it.

I'd like to get paid for my work too, but I'm not so narrow minded as to think that I was the only one to think of the idea and no one else has the right to do anything like it. If someone took parts of my videos and changed them sufficiently to use for something else I wouldn't be surprised they claimed as their own as long as their was value added to it.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Loose Ends

I finally got some pics of my artwork about Peter Max when it was on the door.

I think it looks pretty good, the only part I was confused about was that I thought that the room number and the class that was being taught it it was supposed to be part of the door design, that's why I went through all those rough compositions with different fonts and text placements. I guess it was too hard to get people to integrate the text into the design with specific doors in mind and get them approved. Shows I shouldn't have busted my ass to get it done before he changed his mind about it.

It was a nightmare to get printed because of the resolution and the size really bogged down the memory on the computers when I converted it to a .tif file and putting the 16' x 20' to take up the empty space on the paper made the file over 500 megabytes.

I had to redo the file about 6 times because it keeping getting the wrong resolution or the wrong size or the pixel depth got set at 16 bits instead of 8. Then when it was printing the rollers caught on it and made some marks, it was a good thing the marks were at the top where it was going to be cut off.

When it was going to be laminated, there was some trouble since the laminate they were using on all there others before it was thicker and they had run out of it, so I got some wrinkles and pulled off a bit at the bottom. The surface of the door had some weather damage with the plywood bubbling a bit that caused some bumps.



I got another video in the Revver Film School since I plan to make more money with them this summer. And I also put another on YouTube.



I haven't finished all the dialogue for the GameBot video but I'll have a lot more time to finished next week when I don't have classes for a few months.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Winding Down

The semester is almost over and I've made some progress on some things but not as much as I wanted or was supposed to. I did get a lot of the videos and murals done, but I didn't get my portfolio updated as much I had hoped.

The illustration I did to represent my idea of the kind of art that Peter Max does look good on that door and since it's right in sight of the traffic flow from the parking lot it should get a lot of exposure. That should get me some notice at least, I don't know if it'll do any good for my career but it at it's something I can show off to people that might hire me.

I got some more ads done for Current TV for Sony and they just added a new one for Loreal Men's Expert Hydra-Energetic so I can work on that over the summer, but I'll probabl have to send it in on CD since that Video Egg only works on a Mac

I got an offer from Dawn Cody to do organize some people to do voice acting on my Angel's Destiny videos so that should help to get them on Acceptable.tv especially since she can get the people from Channel 101 involved. That would go a long way to get them on my side and since they were the most influencial group on Acceptable TV getting in good with them would help a lot in getting my stuff on the show for the next season on VH1



I did a couple more music videos on YouTube that got a fair amount of views and links to other sites so hopefully that'll get my stuff more know through viral marketing. That way people will start to recognize my style like they do with other popular people on YouTube.



I've been making more money on Revver and I think I straightened the situation with PayPal so I'll actually be able to use it to get check or buy stuff online with it. They got lots of great stuff on Amazon.com that I could transfer the money I make on Revver. I might even be able to use PayPal to be able to finally sell my stuff from Cafe Press on Ebay. I'll have to check that out and see if I can. That would be a lot better since I haven't been able to get traffic to the Cafe Press site and I don't want to make the investment of buying the products from there and selling them myself until I know it'll be worth it. Doing it through Ebay would be a lot better if I already know I have a seller lined up so I can do the transfer through them without any cost to me.