Art, Copy, Rhetoric and Entertainment

Art and Copy was an interesting change of pace from The Persuaders, especially in theme. It’s not as objective, in that it doesn’t really care about bringing in people who dislike the industry, but as an attempt to justify that industry that makes perfect sense. And the enthusiasm of the interviewees is really contagious, especially considering that advertisers as a whole are generally seen as unpalatable, irritating people.

A lot of the descriptions of advertising done well reminded me of other, more down-to-earth communicators, like historical criers, newspaper boys, bards and jesters. These people could be just as annoying as any YouTube advertisement, but it was taken for granted that any of them who irritated people were just bad at their jobs. No one blames comedians if an awful open-mic act bombs, and the same goes for any other art-form people take seriously. There’s at least a leg to stand on here if you’re an avowed anticonsumerist, and I think the implication toward the end that if the public space isn’t taken up by advertising it’ll be taken up by anti-government rhetoric is a really silly dismissal of communism, but for the average person complaining about the ten-second wait on a YouTube video, the problem isn’t that they’re being sold something but that there’s no charm or excitement in the pitch.

The idea that “We are in the art business when we do it well” deserves to be a maxim for most crafts, really. When I heard that, I realized that I’d never thought of a well-made movie trailer as an advertisement, and I actively enjoyed many more than the films they represented. They’re still trying to sell something to me, but I agree that it’s worth selling.

A perfect example of a trailer whose movie cannot possibly be as good.

That said, I don’t think I’d want to live in a world of extremely charming, well-made advertisements. There’s something scary about the idea that “It’s like you’re in water. It’s around you, it’s going to happen to you”, and a world of friendly, entertaining material selling me things I don’t need sounds like the worst kind of overstimulating chaos. I appreciate the existence of terrible ads, the ones that exist to fill up webpage sidebars or hold up my videos, if only because they remind me to be skeptical of the things I see. There’s a reason, after all, that “trying to sell you something” is a negative description.

Capstone Week 2: Screenwriting, Collaborateurs and Courting the Danish Indie Kids

I discussed this project with my friend Stephen, who’s going to be creating a Capstone next semester, and we’ve decided to collaborate: I’m going to write a script, and he’s going to film it. This makes going forward a lot less complicated, except for the business of deciding what I should be writing. But whatever the finished product should be at this point, I know it has to be filmable by someone with a very low-budget, and I’ve decided to start my research from there. (My entry in Screenwriting class was rejected for filming elsewhere because it was so intensely high-budget, so this is a weakness I direly need to shore up.)

The best resource I’ve found thus far on dealing with penniless-filmmaking is an online article in the magazine Script, written by Clive Davies-Frayne and entitled “Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the FIlm”. It makes some points that were pretty obvious to me, like that you should film all of a location’s scenes all at once at that location, but also some that I’d never thought of, like that defining all your locations from the beginning saves time and effort compared to writing location-independent scenes that could be filmed anywhere. Some of it is based in the idea that the reader will actively be paying actors, and the slightly optimistic note that big names sometimes take on small roles for less money if the productions are interesting enough, but the meat of it is in its advice on making the most of your locations and not just writing long scenes to cover up a dearth of places to go. (This is one of the lucky things about writing a screenplay being shot somewhere you’ve spent four years living in.)

The article also lists items in the manifesto of Dogme95, a film movement started by Lars von Trier & co. in Denmark, the same year I was born. The manifesto forbids things like nondiegetic sound, props not found on location and complicated lighting, and styles itself as a vow of chastity on traditional means of directing. I’d heard of the movement through clicking through random Wikipedia articles a year ago, but I never really understood what they were trying to achieve; looking at it as a money-saving measure the way Davies-Frayne does, the whole thing comes together. However, it also forbids genre movies, and there are some things I’m not sure I’m willing to give up in this as-yet-unconceived script of mine.

Moving forward from here, I’ve found a bunch of guidebooks on writing low-budget scripts, and I know where to find the script of at least one of my all-time favorites, but once I have a concrete direction I’m going in I could take a deeper dive into the films and traditions my work will be trying to descend from.

Work Cited

Davies-Frayne, Clive (2013, Jan 18). Alt Script: Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the Film. Retrieved from http://www.scriptmag.com/features/alt-script-four-ways-to-control-your-scripts-budget-without-compromising-the-film

On the VALS Survey

Having just taken the VALS survey to determine what kind of consumer I am, I received a Primary Type of “Striver” and a Secondary of “Survivor”, which I’m told means that I’m primarily a person who really likes money and wants to be fashionable, and secondarily one who sticks only to favored brands and who thinks the world is changing too quickly. These are not accurate descriptions.

I don’t have any desire to appear wealthy, or to have a large amount of money. In fact, I can’t remember the last “big” purchase I made. I don’t own a television or car, my electronic devices are mostly obsolete by now, my music mostly comes from free distribution networks like Bandcamp and the FMA, most of the other entertainment I watch comes from webshows and podcasts, and I have no interest in appearing fashionable. The only thing I regularly pay for is food, and even that doesn’t cost much.

This all looks like a perfect opportunity to shift me to that “Survivor” designation, but even that’s untrue. It’s not that I consume cautiously, it’s that I try not to consume at all. I don’t trust labels, brands, and companies, not in the paranoid sense that I think they’re going to try to poison me, but in an ideological sense. I don’t want to be a mindless consumer, and I don’t want anyone but me to influence what I do and don’t purchase. It’s the principle of the thing: I’m the one piloting this life I have, and I’m not letting a bunch of garish logos and old white men in boardrooms steer me off course.

So, naturally, I don’t follow them on social networks, or know the major differences between competing ones, or feel particularly moved to go buy things by their advertisements. By any significant measure, the time I have to exist on this planet is incredibly short, and there are far more important things to do with that time than obsess over such superficial trivia as who endorses what shoe and which brand has fewer carbohydrates.

I’m sure that sounds incredibly self-important to some people, like I’m establishing my own superiority over the consumerist masses by saying that I’m oh-so-clever as to not bother with your paltry little systems. And that’s obviously not true. I’m not a feral child or a hermit, and I have to interact with companies constantly. The computer I’m writing on came from one, and so did my fridge, and so did the salt and pepper shakers I have. I might not use different brands with the same frequency as everyone else, but I do still need to use them.

The key difference is that I don’t find anything interesting about what brand I use. I’m not a member of the Coke Generation, I don’t define myself based on the fact that my mp3-player happens to be an Apple product, and I don’t treat my laptop as being more or less valuable because it has a name written on the back. At the end of the day, I drink cola because it tastes good, I use an mp3-player because I like music and radio theatre, and any laptop with a word processor, some storage and wireless internet access would suit my purposes pretty well. I don’t use any of these things to define myself as a person, just merely as devices fulfilling a function I’d like fulfilled.

In fact, the only material possessions I’ve really identified with are some cheap custom buttons I had made online, and a cheap trenchcoat I found in a thrift shop. That trenchcoat’s now ripped thanks to a rogue box of cat litter, and I hardly wear those buttons. Everything else I use is of purely practical value to me.

And, since the test is meant to explain how companies view me in order to show how they’d sell to me, how exactly would they get me to buy a product? The only time I’d buy their product is if I already required it and it was sufficiently nearby and cheap. No amount of advertising, endorsements or attempts at making it the cool, in thing would change that.

I suppose it would be possible to just bombard me with ads until the stars aligned and I needed a product they were offering, but that really would take too much money. I won’t pretend that I’m so culturally-steeled that I’m immune to all advertising, but it is mostly inconvenient for anyone to try selling me things. I don’t represent a customer at all, just a big empty space for brands to waste time and energy trying to get a profit from.

And I have to admit, a lot of this is just cyberpunk-mentality. From the word “go” I already don’t like companies, and I don’t want them faffing about in my business trying to ply their trades. As I’ve said, I have more important things to do than giving them attention and money.

Podcast: Free Music and the Industry

If the player hasn't embedded properly, the original mp3 is on Dropbox here.

This was all recorded in one eleven-minute take, with myself, Stephen and Alex all having read the articles I bring up concerning the issue of free music within the music industry. I mostly bring up topics of discussion here, while they provide the commentary and I occasionally play devil's advocate.

Our referenced articles were, alphabetically, In Defense of Free Music, Recording studio on your laptop could make you a rock star, Steps every indie artist should take to lay a solid career foundation!, and The Future of the Music Business: Farewell to Free.

My Answers to Those Four Questions

1. There are a lot of examples of the medium being the message for me (the entirety of The Stanley Parable springs to mind), but the easiest to express is one of the tenser moments of the computer game Deus Ex. For background, Deus Ex is regarded as a masterpiece of gaming and was the game of the year in 2000 for taking a market dominated by mindless marine vs. monster shooters and a graphics engine practically built out of packing peanuts and creating an epic globetrotting cyberpunk spy-thriller. It was one of the first FPS games where characters lied to you, political and philosophical debates feature heavily, you could approach problems through multiple playstyles, and it was possible to finish the game as a total pacifist. It received two sequels, the first infamous for being dumbed down and the second being the popular game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The original can still be bought online at Steam and GOG for 7-10 dollars.

Without saying much more, it's enough to say that there's a point in the story where you and your brother, Paul, are in a hotel room and lots of powerful people with weapons are coming to take you away. If you're knocked out by them, you're moved to the next part of the game. Paul's heavily wounded and tells you to leave, and there's a window you can escape through before they find you. You eventually end up being caught either way, and Paul ends up dead as a doornail. But, although the game doesn't tell you this, it's possible to save Paul by helping him fight through the hotel and get to the other side. It's incredibly difficult, and plenty of people don't notice because they don't understand how interactive the medium is, and think that there's a developer who simply made saving Paul impossible, and that he's just destined to die. Understanding the freedom that an interactive medium gives you is the only way to escape a lose-lose situation without losing everything.

That entire section (and the graphical quality of the year 2000) is shown in the playthrough below. 

2. Phones definitely act as an extension of my voice. I suppose I could call word processors an extension of my writing hand, but I write and type with different hands. All technologies effectively act as an extension of my brain, in the same way that my voice box communicates what I'm thinking in audible language and my feet convey my body to places I want to go. In that sense, search engines are my digital feet, and recording software can act as my electrical vocal-chords.

Not to get caught up in an aside, but one idea that Accelerando puts forward is the "metacortex," a big ball of digital information that an individual can access, but that has to be separate because it's so much more information and performs more functions than their brains are able to. Basically it's a personal Cloud of all of the information you take in. And it's so crucial to people that at one point in the book, the main character loses the technology he uses to interface with his metacortex, and forgets who and where he is. Perhaps in the future, we'll all end up being extensions of media instead of the other way around.

3. I engage in the global village by having discussions about whether or not there's a canon in Doctor Who with people who live in the U.K. and Texas. Or, more professionally, I've engaged by editing and anthologizing the work of dozens of authors from around America and beyond. In fact, one of the best, Mike Jansen, is Dutch, and I'd never have spoken to him or any of those other writers if Wordpress, Duotrope, Outlook, Smashwords and Microsoft Word didn't exist.

4. I'm a determinist at heart. It's tempting to point to, for example, the Betamax losing against the standard VCR as an example of people deciding for themselves what technology to take in, but it doesn't matter which one they chose, because they wound up with the same basic technology either way. It's not possible to uninvent technology, and when new technology comes up in competing forms, people are free to choose one, but they can't just choose neither. No one rejects a new technology, even when it's something arguably redundant like an iPad. It's simply the way that progress works.

Of course, this kind of thinking also comes from my own, possibly pie-in-the-sky desire to live in a transhumanist future and see a technological singularity in my lifetime. I'd like to think that, although a lot of popular culture's overplayed, bland and meaningless, we're forced to progress no matter how hard some people try to stay in the dark, and that everything's going to be changed by that next genius development, just around the corner.

Creative Commons

 

“Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I freed the music.”

“But you didn’t! You signed rights over-“

“But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so there’ll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to automagically grant any and every copyright request they receive, royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that’s not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya can’t stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle- but I bet she can’t. She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music- instead of a Soviet central planning system. I’ve turned the network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual property.” 

-Accelerando by Charles Stross, pg. 72 (Available as an ebook under Creative Commons here.) 

Copyleft is the way of the future, even though I'm sure plenty of people would rather it not be. Personally, I’m perfectly glad to see alternatives to copyright, and I want to see more lenient copyright laws in the future. And, strangely, this desire stems from works published long, long ago.

Let’s look at Sherlock Holmes for a moment. There are a number of original stories that form the foundation of who Sherlock is, how he acts, and what he does. And, nowadays, those works are all in the public domain. If I wanted to write a Sherlock Holmes story, I could, and plenty of people do. By now, Sherlock Holmes has battled Moriarty in the 22nd Century, grappled with a time-travelling criminal cult in Erasing Sherlock, become a married beekeeper in the Mary Russell novels, met the Doctor and fought the alien god Azathoth in Doctor Who: All-Consuming Fire, and has had two modern-day reimagining TV shows in the 2010s alone, with Sherlock and Elementary.

Now here’s the important part: all of that is fanfiction. It’s fanfiction that people were paid to write and that other people wanted to read, or watch, or listen to. Because people have been free to keep the character alive, they’ve done more with him than Arthur Conan Doyle would ever have humanly been able to. And yet, if their stories featured a Stephen King character instead, they’d be committing a crime. (Sidenote: Now that I mention Stephen King, Roland Deschain should totally fight Professor Moriarty in the 22nd Century.)

This annoys me, chiefly, for two reasons: 1) there are tons of stories I’d like to make or see made that are based on other stories still in copyright, and 2) I’ve read some fanfiction, and speaking as someone who edited countless short stories for a year straight, there are some pieces of fanfiction that deserve novels and movie licenses, and lots of published “original” fiction that shouldn’t be touched with a barge pole.

Some people are afraid that writers and other artists aren’t going to be paid if they start using copyleft, but that’s also nonsense. We live in a world of constant torrenting and piracy, and yet the film and music industries are doing fine and the worst we have are big-name music stars crying into their golden champagne-chalices. Indie artists, the kind who have to make a living for themselves, are actually helped by how far they can spread their work. It turns out that people understand that if you want to see more music from an indie band, or the next novel in a print-on-demand series, then it’s a good idea to support the creator(s) financially.

Demanding attribution is fair, but problems like plagiarism aren’t nearly as big of an issue as some people think. It’s really easy for people to fact-check these days, and anyone who says that they made something which they actually didn’t can be caught in the lie by anyone with five free minutes and a search engine. People, being generally cool individuals, are usually willing to call people out for misattribution without the need for oppressive laws.

I also think that the editing of other work is relatively harmless, and that it can lead to new, weird creations which may have their own artistic merit. I don’t think Cleanflix is making meaningful work, and I think what they’re doing is annoying, but I support their ability to make those edits. I don’t like them, but it would be arrogant of me to say that these practices are only alright when I agree with them. It’s enough to say that I’m not going to be watching any censored-in-the-name-of-family-fun films any time soon, and their existence doesn’t really bother me.