Life as a House Scene Selection

For this weeks assignment, I have chosen to break down a particularly moving scene from Life as a House.








This movie had a significant impact on me years ago when I first saw it. I was able to relate to the character Sam and so it was effective in moving me emotionally (still is, though Hayden's follow up role in Star Wars has taken some of the shine off this acting).

Introductions

Here is my introduction video

Begin Here VLOG Post

I chose to examine the personal VLOG post of Begin_Here as my assignment. This video is cool on so many different levels.

First, this is an inspirational piece. The creator uses speeding rapid side-scroll text as a literal message ("you can start right here, just buckle down, just focus focus your eyes"), metaphor, and physical provocation to focus and realize that skill can become second nature with time, sensitivity, and concentration.

From a technique perspective, the interplay of the fast - but smooth video, a techno rhtythm (homemade), over the fast moving text, and slow moving background of a child drawing video plays well. Because these three mediums are not overly fighting each other (except for certain back lighting portions), the audience is actually comfortable playing along with the creator's game.

Without diving too deeply into the realm of schema theory: immersion and engagement (Douglas and Hargadon, 2001), I believe the type of audience that would most greatly appreciate this title (and perhaps who it was designed for), are those who want to take the challenge to become more deeply engaged with the content and keep playing it back to try and get down what the rolling text says.

Great article from CRJ and NY Times on the new Google Flip-Fast technology search. I reiterated some of the points in my current blog post.

CNN also used the occasion of the Flip-Fast launch, to report on Bing's bucket search type approach for images. A kind of arms race between the search engines is brewing, and this has important ramifications for how we find and consume (e.g., aggregation) information.