Marc Tuters

several of the students in imd have taken issue with the copyright agreement in cinema and television's production classes. i understand, from scott's orientation seminar yesterday, that a discussion is underway between he and the dean regarding updating the copyright agreement to be more consistent with the divisions' blogging practices.

as i understand it from a quite close reading, cinema does not lay claim to ip but rather to the copyright of what we produce. as a matter of course research institutions claim ownership of the the ip that is generated in their departments and all the spin-off that might entail. so i guess, from a certain legalistic point of view then, it could be argued that cinema is even being generous in offering that students keep their underlying ip.

if that is the case, i'm not sure that i necessarily buy that argument, but... in any case... personally, my issue is less with the university claiming ownership of the content that we produce and more with their prohibition over our distributing our work over the internet (or at the very least an inter-departmental intranet). does cinema and television not, after all, offer a course entitled database cinema? (friday from 1-3pm for those interested).

as mr. hall and i discussed recently, having past student film projects digitized and entered into a database would be phenomenal resource (and a not a bad idea for a thesis project either). the bbc has led the way in this area by creating an archives of its tv libraries, and as far as i'm aware it hasn't led to any british tv pirate underground (although that sounds pretty cool)... other film institutes like the national film board are trying to emulate the bbc's model, shouldn't we be doing the same?

please forgive me if this is old hat, as a first year student i don't know where the state of this discussion currently lies, but it seemed to me like this was at least an appropriate subject for a blog post.

how about throwing that new draft content license up on the blog for students and faculty to comment on?

marc

Posted by Marc Tuters at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Tracy, who I understand just broke her fingers! (my sympathies), instructed us to take ideas from bits of magazines, and make a kind of board game with them. With scissors, glue and card stock, we cut-up two copies of Variety and a copy of the LA Times and made a set of flash cards for our concept. The game involved players competing against one another to come up with creative answers to a set of funny questions. They were to compose the answers to questions like "Name a new children's breakfast cereal" from a stack of words we dealt them. Their answers were judged, by us, and the winner was awarded points as well as got to collect the other players' cards. The object of the game was to score the most points and collect as many cards as possible.

Originally when we beta tested the idea ourselves we used only one card to answer, but prior to having the other group play we decided that they could use multiple cards to compose an answer. The results were that in their first try they used like 4 cards and their answers didn't seem to make much sense (at least to me). Interestingly, this problem immediately regulated itself once the player saw that they would end up loosing those cards, and in subsequent turns players put down only one or two cards on average.

While I think we were all a bit pleased with our clever ideas when we came up with it, in execution it seemed not to work so well since we had the context for how it was supposed to work, and were, presumably willing to overlook the flaws in the idea.

An interesting exercise and a valuable technique for taking an idea from concept to bare bones realization in very little time.

Posted by Marc Tuters at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Marc Tuters at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Does anyone know much about the "state of the art" in wireless cameras?
I'm looking for a battery powered camera with maximum image quality and maximum range.
mt (marc)

Posted by Marc Tuters at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)