Clerks II Signs

So most people know that I love the Clerks movies, so I wanted to try and see what types of signs I could find in there, to exercise the reading for Thursday’s class. This is from the sequel to the movie, and, of course, has some epic R-rated language, but it makes me laugh, and we’re adults, so I hope this is OK for posting. So here we go…

The first thing that struck me was a sign of the title of this video. I thought this was where Jay rapped his signature rap, as it was referenced in the his own movie (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), but this version of the rap is different, and is indicative of the time he has spent in jail and cleaning his life around. It’s also not as loaded with as many epithets as his usual mouth, but it’s a sign that the rehab program he was in has started to change his thinking. It’s even more interesting to see Silent Bob’s expression as Jay is rapping, as he sort of shies away – it’s not Jay’s best, and it doesn’t sound really good. This might be a sign of how he really feels for Jay – either concerned for him, or embarrassed that he still hangs out with Jay.

Where Jay and Silent Bob are standing is also very interesting – they are standing in front of a Mooby’s fast food restaurant in Leonardo, New Jersey (a place that has been established to be a “waste pit” in other movies). The Mooby’s is also a reference to McDonald’s, because it’s everywhere in the View Askew universe (the set of movies Kevin Smith has directed with these characters), a sign of its omnipresence and hold over the lives of people who can’t get a “real job” (aka Dante and Randal, and Jay and Silent Bob usually end up wherever Dante and Randal go, maybe a sign of fate?). The bricks behind them are quite apparent, even though the Mooby’s logo is perfectly written on there and the paint looks really good. It’s an interesting sign because the stereotype of New Jersey is that it is a dump and that large buildings like this usually receive a lot of graffiti (which ends up happening later). It’s an interesting sign at the possibility of hope of life for Dante, Randal, Jay, and Silent Bob. Now that’s something I didn’t see when I saw the movie the first time around.

I also appreciated the fact that not only did this scene point to and reference other movies (the Buddy Christ shirt is from Dogma), but it also pointed to what our commonsense notion of what a drug dealer and a reborn Christian talks and acts like. Even though Jay and Silent Bob have gone through jail, they both still have the same posture and the same types of conversations of when they were drug dealers (could be signifying that rehab doesn’t work fully?), but that the experience was worthwhile for them, as they now found the Bible, and Jay wants to do something with his life now. It’s even more of a sign of how the experience of jail worked on them, because their language is still roughly the same as when they were standing in front of the Quick Stop. Another “cue”/sign here is that Silent Bob is in the scene, as he’s the director and the character, but he holds up the Bible to the camera when Jay references it, potentially showing us a view they may/may not have in terms of faith and religion in modern day society (could be parodying this type of people, which I could see).

I couldn’t really find too many more signs of the change of Jay and Silent Bob (other than than the lack of music going on – since it is silent – Jay usually raps with non-diegetic music – it seems to signify something has changed about his lifeworld), but their costumes are a little bit cleaner and worn on them as well, signifying their use in jail, along with the hard lives they have been leading until this point. The costumes of the people who want to buy drugs from them also were done well enough (including their posture), to signal that they were also down on their luck and they think that weed will help them, but the audience ends up being surprised that the main reason they choose this dealer is that he makes them laugh – a sign for the audience to laugh, as it is unexpected.

Please feel free to add on – I would like to see what other signs I take for granted in this scene, as I know these characters pretty well (or at least I would like to think so).

(^^)V

Mise-en-Scene Breakdown

So I would like to do a breakdown of the mise-en-scene of one of my favorite video games: Skies of Arcadia: Legends (GCN). I will try and use the definitions on pp6 of the Lacey reading.

Temporal Aspects to Keep in Mind

There are a couple of things to keep in mind while trying to do an accurate job at looking at the scene here: this battle is usually taken on later in the game, and has happened three times before, each of varying difficulty. This is the end of a sidequest and story that makes the party especially powerful when completed – the boss is worth a level of experience when defeated (most enemies aren’t – a lot of grinding has to go on to be able to complete this battle!)

Some Visual Aspects

The player is treated to a typical RPG menu overlay on top of the camera work. The spirit points, the gauge as to what types of special moves or magic can be used, is displayed at the top of the screen, and the main menu of commands are also displayed in the lower left corner, accompanied by a set of icons to make it easier to see what the possible choices are for the player. Also, whenever a move, magic, or attack is done, it is shown on the top of the screen as the actor plays this part of the scene, which allows the player to not only confirm what has been selected, but to help prepare for what should be done next round.

The battle takes place on an imperial battleship, complete with a bridge and “quad”-laser that’ll take out demigods with ease. The battleship is huge, has multiple floors, and is made out of metal (I believe). The battle takes place on the front deck of the ship, only after this imperial battleship docks with a very small boat that the antagonist pilots. The battle also allows the player to be in a small amount of control of the camera, as he/she can move the camera during the “turn preparation” (before the scene, aka turn, has happened) – this isn’t shown as well. Also, the camera pretty much is satisfied to circle over the action for most of the battle, until it zooms in on a player or computer, when their turn is taken. Then the camera programmatically repeats this until the battle is over.

Aural Components

This is the best part of the scene, as this is the part of the experience I cue into the most while playing an RPG (besides focusing in on the action). The sounds used for all menu operations are very small, quick, and pretty much to-the-point. They become musically and a cue for one to get to the actions one wants to take, and are very helpful in this way. What’s missing is the sounds of the control stick and the button presses on the GameCube controller.

The main reason why the experience of playing this game is so epic is due to the boss music. The first whoosh that occurs is a sign of an upcoming boss fight, cued by the signature boss music itself. The music is also reactive to the context of the boss fight as well: when the main character dies, the music segues to an uphappy and distressing tune, to let the player know that the fight is not going in their favor, and must do something to turn the battle around. There’s also the segue to the epic happy music when the player is winning, and happens later in the video, as this cues the player that he/she is winning and needs to keep pouring it on to achieve victory. It is also possibly to get the most epic segue, from getting it to go from the bad music all the way up to the win music in one blow – it’ll blow your mind, and make the hair stand up on the back of your neck (that’s why I keep playing this game! – I even prolong the boss fights to hear the music more, too). The music also has more cues as well, as one can hear the death knell from the bell in the beginning of the cutscene, showing the player that this is going to be tough (and it is a tough fight, believe me). There’s also the happy post-battle music too, along with the posing and victory chants as well too, and I hum this as well along with the video.

The Performance of the Actors

There are 6 character actors here in this battle (unless one wants to count the ship, as it is pretty vital to this battle). They are: (protagonists) Vyse (main character in blue), Aika (girl with orange ponytails), Fina (girl dressed in all white and veil), and Enrique (the other guy, who’s pretty epic); (antagonists) Piastol (a secret boss – this is the 4th encounter), and her puppy. Each character has their own set of moves, namely attacking, adding spirit points (the thing on the top of the screen used to determine special moves) or using a special move. Most of the acting in this battle is determined by the player (except for the cutscene beforehand), and can be changed to do whatever he/she wants – this was just one way of acting this battle out. Each of these sets of actions has their own way of being acted out (namely, each animation is different, the way the battle is being acted). The player also gets to see the costumes each character has: Vyse is a sky pirate, so he wears blue denim, sky goggles, and has a double set of cutlasses; Aika is the girl next door type of character, so she wears a yellow skirt, tall boots, and uses a boomerang (she tries to get Vyse’s attention a lot, but not in this battle); Fina is a mage, so she gets to wear a white dress and veil, uses a very subdued and demure posture, and utilizes her magical pet Cupil as her weapon; Enrique is a prince, so he wears very formal and imperial clothing, stands tall and proud, and utilizes a rapier (a very fancy and refined sword). What’s super interesting here is that the acting is very repetitious (the typical RPG battle), even though it is a boss fight (the player utilizes each character’s “role” in order to achieve the “good” ending of this scene), even though the player of this movie could have done a different script to achieve the same ending, although not recommended by other players (I would have done this at a much later experience level, personally, and focused on speed of attack and the team’s special attack, not shown here, but causes the moon to come out of the sky and destroy the battlefield). The items also play a critical role here, as they not only help the team to victory, but they have their own animation (which can be bypassed if desired – but all enemy animations cannot be bypassed), which reinforces their role in the script of victory here.

I could go deeper, but I would like to start a conversation about this, so please jump on in!

Moar Brain Dumping

So I also am going to put up what I have been thinking about for the mock outline exercise. The interaction (again) I was thinking about looking at phenomenologically is the Rock Band character creator:

So I won’t be able to give the “whole” outline here, but the topic I would be talking about is that creating rockers are a painful and reflective experience. The “pain” and “reflective” aspects are the things I would like to attempt to work out phenomenologically. In terms of the actual game experience, the pain comes in through what type of controller you are using to create/edit your rocker, how much time you can dedicate to your rocker, when/where you play Rock Band, and also if you can actually find anything in the rocker’s closet that will please your tendencies.

In terms of a reflective experience, I find this interaction to allow one to reflect on what it means to be a rocker for his/herself, reflect on the achievements done in game, listen and take action on other players’ comments about your rocker, how one can continuously keep reforming their “rocker identity” to the world, and how one can keep pushing themselves to make a better rocker.

So I’ll have to go back to my notes and see if I can find anything to support this (which I believe so, as this came from a reflection on my notes), but I was wondering what the class thinks of at large about how to pull this off in a written form.

(^^)V

WWE Technical Semiotics

So after reading this first introduction about semiotics, and while watching WWE’s Monday Night Raw, it got me thinking about how the theme music they use is loaded with semiotic cues for us to gain insights about the lifeworlds of the wrestler we’re about to watch. I thought it was kinda cool, so I thought I would try some explainin’. This is an older video (from 2007), but the first 2:30 is what I’ll be talking about and worth looking at from a semiotic-ian standpoint.

Embodied Jet Force Gemini and RE4

Talking about game semiotics last thursday, along with the new readings on embodied interaction made me think of one of my favorite games ever, Jet Force Gemini. I’ll try and explain some of the tacit knowledge of being a gamer that semiotics has given me, along with trying to briefly being able to describe the embodiment I find in this game.

Quick Backstory

This game is about three space travelers who are fighting against the evil bug-robot Mizar. Our protagonists are Juno, Vela, and Lupus, and this game was originally on the N64. The story so far is that they have seen the evil Mizar enslave a happy set of bear-people, called the Tribals, into doing his evil bidding. The video here places the player at the first “level” of Vela, on the starship Sekhmet. The video also starts halfway through the level, as well.

The Tacit Knowledge

So here’s where the gamer and the tacit knowledge take part. The first room the video takes place in is a “safe room”, as there are no baddies. This is due to the fact there is someone the player has to talk to in order to get a key and some important weapon pickups in there. It’s also a plain square room that doesn’t feature that much else as well, which communicates that the room is just to be used quickly and just for the items (even though the player needs to come back here).

Then the player goes back through some small tunnels to get back to a large room (the tunnel’s purpose is just a connector, and some fighting occurs here). This large room was the scene of a lot of fighting, as the different walls in the room afford cover for the player and the baddies. This room also is a springboard to other areas of the level, but only if the player has the jetpack accumulated later in the game. This is communicated through the small tunnels at the very top and back of the screen, which tells the player: “haha – I’m here but you can’t get to me yet!”.

The next room affords a lot of information for not only the player, but the viewer. A ton of baddies come flying in from the top of the screen and from in front of the player. This speaks to the player that they need to enter first person mode and shoot them all. When this happens, the player moves the targeting crosshairs over the targets, which then make a sound every time. This indicates to the player that he/she is locked on to a target and can begin to fire. When the player successfully removes a target, the baddie makes a sound, whether it be an explosion or a death scream. This indicates to the player that he/she can move on. When all the baddies are removed, the door at the end opens (because it’s green, and the camera centers on it, and it has been a mechanic the player has gotten used to by now).

Once done, the player moves into the next area, which has a maze on top of the boiling lava. This immediately tells the player that not only a physical challenge is needed to traverse this lava, but also that there might be more trouble ahead, since there are almost always baddies in every room, unless the music changes or there is an NPC in the room. Once completed, the player moves in the next room, which has a walkway. This immediately connotates to the player that it is meant to be walked on and followed through the whole time to get to the next area, even though there are jumps to complete and elevators to use as well. Other cues in this puzzle are from Floyd, your robot friend, who alerts you to baddies in the area – he makes a sound and glows red (and is accompanied by red arrows on the side of the screen to tell you where the baddies are). All of these help to make the challenge easier.

Also, I didn’t mention that the elevators move up and down, which also tell the player you are meant to use them in that fashion. The tribals in this room on unreachable platforms also tell the player that he/she needs to come back with something that will make this area accessible. There is also the usage of a blue glowing corridor to help point out to the player where the goal to get to is. Without the color, it makes it a little harder to figure out where to go. The music also spurs the player on, since it is epic and awesome, that action is needed to keep the story and the action going, too.

Then there’s another small room again where the player has to destroy a lot of baddies to move on, but this time they move faster and shoot back a lot more, which tells the player that this type of challenge will have to involve accuracy and sidestepping/strafing. But the player also sees the cue that if this challenge is completed well, this is actually a rewarding encounter, as there is a lot of life (the pink gems) and ammo boxes around. The next areas also feature the same type of cues (long hallways full of baddies, and small rooms full of items and respite). These are the types of cues gamers can pick up on, and really utilize them in crafting an experience that will let them be a better player.

For me, this type of reading makes for me a full embodied interaction with the game, as not only am I literally in the game, but I am also reading it and making a conversation about it. I may be talking to the designers through the game, or with other people about the game, but I just really like how these things can truly “get me into the game”. And that’s the embodied experience I go for.

Epic Rant

Unlike the following:

This is the much hated and loathed Krauser fight in Resident Evil 4. (Start at around 2:20, and this is not the GameCube version that I know, but it’s still roughly the same game). Heidegger has finally given me the words I needed to explain why I hate this:

He argues that the mouse exists for us as an entity only because of the way in which it can become present-at-hand, and becomes equipment … only — through the way in which- it can be ready-to-hand.

Resident Evil 4 is a game through which all of the action looks like a cutscene. It is in letterbox, a long time cue to the player to take a break and enjoy the story. This game takes the opposite view, and makes all of the action only available through this type of view. The fight that you see is the hardest in the game, in my opinion, as the player is not only being exposed to story, but has to have lightning-fast reflexes to get through the 6 or 7 challenges to press buttons in order to survive and see the story (and also, why does a knife kill him instantly, but zombies can’t?). The point here is that the cutsene makes me think it is time to take a rest, the present at hand view of gaming that I have. But, no, they like to force me to realize the story IS the game, and then the game forces me to take it as ready to hand (hope i got that right). Anyway, the combination of being forced to do this challenge, while transforming the current notion of story as (instead of) being present at hand, where I can enjoy it, to something as ready-to-hand, where I have to confront it in a way that makes me really really really really really really angry. I will always try to skip by and pray I get through this part due to this type of change in the game and the style of gaming.

Looks like it’s time for another post to be done.

Quick Veronique Critique!

As I was not fully quenched by Kickasola, I read the user comments on IMDB, a few other critics and blog posts. Here are a few things that I found interesting.

Roger Ebert:
Roger Ebert is no Kickasola but I found a few things interesting in his critique of the movie. It starts with the sentence “Here is a film about a feeling.” Then he talks about Kieślowski’s style as below.

“He is drawn to coincidence and synchronicity. He is little interested in focusing on a character hurling from point A in the first act to Point C in the third. He is fascinated by Point B, and the unseen threads linking it to past and present. His films can be mystical experiences. He trusts us to follow him, to sense his purpose, to leave the theater having shared his openness to a moment. The last thing you want to do after a Kieślowski film is “unravel” the plot. It can’t be done.”

Slavoj Žižek:
For the few of us who cannot sleep unless we unravel the message, I found that this small snippet almost paraphrases it. It’s an excerpt from an essay titled “The Forced Choice of Freedom” written by Žižek.

“The perception of our reality as one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema.”

Joseph G. Kickasola
I am pretty sure this guy was stalking Kieślowski. I am absolutely stunned by both by the quantity and quality of nuanced observations and interpretations he provides us. He situates his interpretation based on the author’s previous works (references to The Decalogue), life (French and Polish politics), lifeworld (Kieślowski’s attitude towards old people) and through his own judgements as well. This, we all agree, is by no means a simple task and Kickasola has done a kick-ass job. (Sorry couldn’t resist it!)

And here is where I start whining. I have one huge issue with this article. He beautifully states of what I think is the paradigmatic glasses we need to be wearing while watching Kieślowski’s movies.

“… the essence of the film hinges on the experience of watching it, not simply on an understanding of its story, characters, and use of metaphor.”

After stating this, he does exactly the opposite – explains the story and provides rationalistic explanations to the characters’ traits by contextualizing them with respect to the metaphors and motifs of religion, spirituality, politics and philosophy. It does help us understand the movie better but aren’t Kieślowski’s movies meant to evoke? Does one need to have a rational understanding to “feel” it better? If Kickasola is trying to do that, then he is essentially at logger heads with Kieślowski.

Kickasola paraphrases Kieślowski’s attitude towards this by saying
“This type of abstract, nonverbal “rhetoric” can be very persuasive…”

In other words, to me it feels like Kickasola attempts to help us understand a movie that the director did not want us to understand in the first place.

All said and done, I do not deny the fact that knowing about the director’s life, his works, his beliefs, the metaphors and motifs used in the movie and Kickasola’s interpretation of them have definitely enriched me to understand the movie. But the answer to the question whether it has helped me to feel it better is NOT a big resounding yes!

PS: I wonder how Pauline Kael would have critiqued this movie!

It’s a Walk Off!

So here’s another video to try to bring some of the concepts we have been talking about together for the past couple of weeks into a juicy video that we can also laugh at: it’s the walk off scene from Zoolander. This is one of my favorite movies ever, and it’s for a lot of reasons that I won’t put here. Anyways, enjoy the video, and there’ll be my post after it.

Using Zoolander as a Synopsis

There are many different reasons for using Zoolander, and I’ll just start with the facts that David Bowie and Michael Jackson are represented in this video, so we’ll use that as a baseline. Also, since we just finished talking about men’s fashion, I’ll take a brief (haha – there’s a pun if you watched the video) look into this.

So Derek Zoolander challenges Hansel to a walk-off as a way to prove that he’s still got the skills to be the best male model out there. He struts his stuff in what I can only imagine to be designer red leather clothes that he can easily throw off to the crowd, as the clothes end up augmenting his skills as a model. They empower him to be better at his craft: male modeling. They are also his identity (mer-man!), as he has known nothing else in his life besides modeling. He’s got the perfect complexion, and also “his hair looks really really good with gel in it”, and the clothes become his second skin, as he becomes super comfortable in them – they are his work after all. They also show the viewer that this second skin that he wears all the time, coupled with his physical prowess, make people think that he is really, really not intelligent. Derek wants kids to be able to read good, too, and that’s a healthy aspiration for anyone to have. The film also shows Derek trying to overcome what he knows and his clothes make others think he is as well, which is what I also got out of the men’s clothing reading. There is more to people than what the clothes they wear, even though this is the only readily accessible access point to their lifeworld. I wonder how we can compare these male models to real male models – what differences would we end up finding?

So also, why do I keep end up talking about clothing and interpretation in this class? This is a central issue I believe is at play in my capstone, and the only way for me to begin to understand a theoretical viewpoint is for me to keep expressing it out loud to everyone.

And Hansel is trying to earn a living, but he’s just as scared of other male models too, which says volumes about the total package of clothing and body posture. That says a lot about phenomenology to me, how bout you?

Also, we should get a chance to bring everyone together to watch this: it’s loaded with different aspects for us to take to the critique table.

(^^)V

Understanding vs. Meaning

When I was reading for today, I started to wonder, “Is understanding really that important if I find a meaning that isn’t grounded in the artist’s or designer’s intentions?”  I like the idea of interpretation based on life-worlds, but the concept of understanding bothers me.  If I find meaning in a painting that is personally relevant to me, what does it matter if I took the artist’s intentions into account.  Sure I’m not exploring the history of the painting and, therefore, I can’t necessarily infer what the artist meant, but what if I’m not interested in what the artist meant.  In some cases I can see where this is helpful, such as art history, or learning from a designer’s solution to a design problem, but that’s not always important.

Also what happens when the meaning of something changes over time based on context?  Like in the fashion article, it talked about how the meaning of blue jeans have evolved over time.  If I don’t know the entire history of blue jeans, does that mean that I don’t understand that blue jeans are to be interpreted as casual wear in this day in age?  If I don’t know that the first person to make blue jeans intended them for rugged-wear, does that mean I am not expressing myself when I wear a pair because I ultimately don’t know what that pair of jeans means?

I also considered writing a post about traveling in a time machine and how understanding anything would be difficult because my life-world would be drastically different than the life-world of a person living in that time.  Including that traveling in shorter periods of time would be easier to understand because the context is closer to the context in which my life-world developed.  <– But I didn’t for times sake and there’s the gist anyway

Understanding Comics

As some of you may know, I’ve been trying to cram so that I can speak intelligently to Scott McCloud when he’s here next week.  I just finished his first book, Understanding Comics.  It was amazing.

First of all, let me say that one of the primary reasons I found it compelling was its format.  Unlike many other ‘theory books’ Understanding Comics is more or less a comic book.  Panels and word balloons… the whole shebang.

A lot of people hear me saying things like, “Too many words” and “I can’t read”.  It’s kind of a joke, but it’s kind of not.  The way my brain works, I can only pick up every other paragraph of a paper before my mind starts wandering.  Probably not something to brag about in a blog for a class that requires a 10 page paper at the end.    Anyway, as a comicker (one who makes comics) myself, my brain was better able to soak in the contents of this book, and, unlike most of the papers I’ve read, my mind has been blown.

Even though it seems at first to be a ‘comic about comics’, McCloud really gets to the root of comics on a psychological, subconscious, theory-rich level.

How is this relevant to this class (besides being awesome)?  He’s got a chapter called “The Vocabulary of Comics” which boils down to visual iconography and how we interpret those icons… I’d like to call this semiotics.

He has another chapter called “Blood in the Gutter” which is about how we interpret the space between the panels in a comic based on our own experience.  People will ’see’ the comics in different ways even though they see the same panels on the page because their own experiences creates the closure between the panels.  Phenomenology?

Anyway, my conclusion is that Scott McCloud is a genius and I’m looking forward to reading his other two books.  I highly suggest reading at least this first one to anyone.

trying to understand phenomenology and structuralism in Thomas Humphrey reading

First I didn’t think about how this reading is related to what we are talking about in class now until I reached “PD(planned discovery) exhibits are sometimes phenomenologically rich enough for self-discovery to be possible,…”  Why did the author use “phenomenologically” to describe the richness of an museum exhibits?  What on earth does this mean?  How does phenomenology have something to do with PD museum exhibits? Today’s lunch time, Chad mentioned that the APE (Active Prolonged Engagement)is sort of structuralism point of view.  What??What??  How on earth does structuralism have anything to do with museum exhibits too??  We didn’t have time to finish this conversation, which lead to this blog post of my “guessing” and trying to understand phenomenology and structuralism in the context of this reading.

In Barnard’s Visual Culture, he mentioned that in hermeneutic traditions, the life-world is the starting point of understanding, and “intention proved to be what the hermeneutic tradition conceived understanding to begin from.”  If we think about PD exhibits, they actually promote sort of phenomenological way of understanding.  Visitors with their own individual life-world, follow the exhibits’ instructions, look for and observe what they’re told to see, do what they are told to do, during which they expand their life-world and horizons and get closer to the exhibit creator’s horizons and intentions.  The whole process is about individual’s understanding, and a fusion of horizon of visitors and creators.

As for structuralism, as explained by Barnard “the individual consciousness is itself a product of structures.”  “Meaning, here is something which must be organized, it is the result, or product, of a place in a structure , an organized set of elements.” “Understanding is a product of structure, not of individual intention.”  Then let’s look at APE again through the lens of structuralism.  APE promotes to put visitors in the whole network of exhibits elements, events, and other visitors.  It is through the active interaction with the exhibits and other visitors, the meaning comes clear.  Authority is shifted from museum or exhibits creators to visitors, who become the participant of their own discovery.  “APE unfolded as a series of attempts to discover, create, and refine strategies for promoting and measuring active prolonged engagement.” In the whole network and structure of visitors, their attempts, social interactions, doing and undergoing with the museum exhibits and so on, the meaning and understanding of individual visitor is constructed and produced.

hmmm, I’m not sure if the above makes sense or just bullshit…any comments are welcome.  Please help me understand the two terms:phenomenology and structuralism…..:(