Is it Creativity?In today's world, I believe that true originality is hard to find. Everything is a remake of something. Kirby Ferguson's video series called 'Everything is a Remix' helped me realize how 'most box office hits rely heavily on existing material'. In the video, Ferguson defines remix as "to combine or edit existing materials to produce something new". There are many examples of how the same bass line of a specific song has been used for several different songs. There are many movies that are adaptions and transformations of other existing material. In this post, I'm going to discuss how the movie "Star Wars" was combined and edited. First of all, Star Wars is inspired by Joseph Campbell's book "The Hero with a thousand faces". As mentioned in the video, it is also influenced by a lot of other movies such as The call to Adventure and Supernatural Aid. Many scenes in the movie are similar to other existing material from all over the world. There are many resemblances from other movies incorporated in Star Wars. The main point here is that without the existing scenes, shots and ideas from other movies, Star Wars would not have been present today. But the question is, Is that Creativity? Wasn't it copied? Well, I agree that Star Wars has many scenes resembling from other movies. Star Wars is a remix of other existing materials. Without copying, we cannot learn. It is through the process of copying that we learn to combine, adapt and transform. I believe that George Lucas, who produced Star Wars, did not copy exact ideas from other movies. He combined, edited, adapted and transformed other ideas to form his own version of a movie. Some light saber scenes from the movie, arm chop scene and others were combined and transformed from other scenes. Star Wars' credit list format at the end of the film is copied from the movie Flash Gordon. The resembling scenes from these movies in Star Wars cannot be categorized as 'copied' because the producer has given enough changes to create something new. The story line, setting, atmosphere, weather, angles, languages are all different from other movies, not making it an 'exact copy'. Ideas are hard to come up with these days, since so much time has passed. Creativity can originate from another existing material. That is exactly what I think about Star Wars. It is a very creative movie, combined, edited and transformed from other ideas. Although, I do think that credits should definitely be given when copying, combining and transforming. Otherwise, the origin of the idea will not receive much appreciation if it later becomes popular through a remix. Finally, to avoid ripping something off, make sure to transform a real idea a lot, enough to make it your own. Change as many aspects of it as possible to create a new element. Never forget to give credits to the sources you copied from. If you follow these guidelines, you can pretty much make sure that nothing's been 'ripped off'. Links to images and video references: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Star_Wars_Logo.svg/1280px-Star_Wars_Logo.svg.png https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HuenDPZw0 http://www.ufunk.net/en/musique/everything-is-a-remix-lhistoire-du-remix-en-7-minutes/
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My thoughts on episode 1 of SERIALThis is my very first time listening to a podcast. I didn’t expect a podcast to be as interesting, because it is just audio and there is nothing to see. Despite, listening to Serial was very interesting. The sound effects, music and every other component enhanced the message being spread. I really enjoyed listening to episode 1 of Serial. I don’t usually like mysterious stories or what not, but this story, like Sarah Koenig said, ’fascinated’ me. The fact that this story took place in 1999 (the year I was born) has something to do with my fascination. It also interests me that the story is about high school students that were my age. I also know some family friends that live in Baltimore, Maryland.
The idea of presenting investigative journalism in this format is very creative. It helped to give thoughts and insights from every part of the story and not just one side. My personal opinion is that Sarah Koenig has shown no bias on either side. Although, if this information were to be presented as a news report, I believe that there would have been some sort of bias since news reporters tend to lean on to one side of the story and leave the other side unexplained. The victim’s family, in my opinion would feel satisfied if the series ended with clear solutions about the case. As I only listened to the first episode, I’m not sure how the series ended. Since I listened to the first episode, I can say that the podcast producers have done lots of research into the case, giving them more detailed information about how, what, when, why, who, and where. This information will definitely help the victim’s family to calm down and heal, since it will give them peace of mind that the case is under consideration and solutions are being found. I think that I like listening to text like this than reading. Sometimes when I read, I get really confused about what the author is trying to say. Although when I listen to the podcast, it’s more like a conversation and helps me understand better. The disadvantage about a podcast is that you will have a hard time going back to something that you wanted to look over. In a book though, you just have to flip through pages to find specific information. As I was writing this post, I had a hard time finding exactly what I wanted from the podcast file. I generally do a decent job at memorizing, but if you asked me about events that occurred over 15 years ago, I would definitely be clueless. Since this podcast was made 15 years after the real incident, the witness’ information can be a little fuzzy. The information will not be clear enough because of such a huge time interval between the events. Image from: https://typeset-beta.imgix.net/rehost/2016/9/13/47af5b92-ad4e-47ab-ad9c-ec5d5e0bf5cd.jpg |
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AuthorI am Keziah Vilson from A.B. Lucas Secondary School. I write about topics we cover in my grade 12 English class. Archives
December 2016
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