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Artificial Intelligence is a very fascinating topic to go into. The concept of basically creating life through a robotic means is something new that many of us haven't thought about. It also is interesting when getting into these topics concerning film and stories and understanding where the underline meaning lies and what is being portrayed.
The film Ex Machina is one of the films that caught my interest into the world of artificial intelligence. I fell in love with Ex Machina with its aesthetically pleasing movie set up, the characters within the movie (rarely do I fall in love with every single character in a movie), and just the underline meaning of the story. The storyline was automatically captivating to me, honestly when watching the movie from beginning to end, you never really realize that you are watching the movie from the protagonist viewpoint of the story. And no the main protagonist actually isn't Caleb, granted we are following him around in the story and watching from his point of view but we are actually watching the protagonist point of view of Ava through the eyes of Caleb. This concept I've never thought about or ever really seen from a film before and that instantly captures my attention at specific points within the movie. . The director also talks about how during this entire film process he used no green screen. Which shouldn’t be shocking to me but it is, there were times within the film where I was convinced they used a green screen. Knowing that they didn’t is actually such an accomplishment within this sci-fi movie. The actors performances throughout the entire film makes the film what it is. The character Nathan is more so a prick who is very intelligent but also an alcoholic, his character dynamic was extremely interesting to see and throughout the film the actor allows the true intentions of his character to flow the way it needs to. I wanted to speak on Nathan more because as an audience member the character of someone like Nathan is not the ideal character many of us as audience member love. But for myself I fell in love with the character Nathan gradually which I shocked myself honestly. Nathan knew the intentions of his robot Ava was, in a way he knew that Ava was going to manipulate Caleb he was paying attention and listening to everything. One of the things is you also saw that Ava and Nathan were competing for that "one step ahead of each other" race. Nathan was trying to keep Ava in the room she was in and Ava was trying to find any type of means to get out. And there were median to do that with, was Caleb. Caleb was the true test subject in this entire movie, which even took Caleb aback as well as myself but made so much sense. Here is how it made sense. In the scene where Caleb is talking to Nathan about if its possible to have sex with Ava, Nathan assures him that he can have sex with Ava and that there is a genital like area where intercourse can happen. This sparks my curiosity because you start seeing within the film that Caleb is starting to fall in love with Ava, but Ava isn't human she is a robot. But her mannerisms are human like and she is constantly showing emotion to Caleb in ways that is making Caleb fall in love with her. But this is part of the manipulation process. Ava wants to escape and will do anything to leave her room and acquire freedom. She understands human emotions, implementing them is a different story. Ava has to convince Caleb that Nathan is possibly the bad guy, and she is a victim in this entire ordeal. But relating back to the sex talk scene I do believe that when Caleb asked Nathan that question in some way he was falling in love with Ava, which in some way is a manipulation by Ava. Another scene that was actually my favorite was when Nathan told Caleb that he, himself, was the test subject. Which baffled Caleb because Caleb thought that he was testing Ava and Ava was the test subject. But it all makes sense. Nathan knew that Ava wanted to escape and he knew what Ava was capable of. The only problem was that Caleb was becoming attached to Ava in some way and wanted to get her out. He was feeling emotions towards her and wanted to kind of “save her.” I loved kind of this notion the film was going it made sense that the person coming to visit Nathan was the test subject. Of course Nathan was not expecting Caleb to hack his security, which caused Ava to escape and kill him. Also Caleb didn’t realize that Ava tricked him until she locked him in the room leaving him to die. I can’t really pinpoint what the overall meaning of the film was. I think I can guess it. Are we really going to understand the full intentions of something we create? Nathan knew that every robot he created wanted to escape, but he didn’t realize how attached his test subject Caleb was going and that Caleb was going to hack the system. The problem with Ava was she was already aware, and when she became aware she wanted freedom. Which was something Nathan wasn’t gong to give her. But he didn’t understand to the extent Ava was going and how well she could manipulate Caleb. As humans we want to create A.I.s and when we do there’s this God complexity we get because we basically created life. When it comes to copyright laws, the protection of the original work is never an issue with people. Everyone would love to make sure that anything they create is protected and they are credited for their work. Now the only problem with copyright that rubs me and many other people the wrong was is the interpretations and judgments, in my opinion it seems as if, if you want to take inspiration or you are influenced from something regarding music, film, literature, etc, then you have to really go through some sort of legal agreement for it or you have to find loopholes to be able to do things like that. Take Disney for instance, our childhood favorite company. Disney basically started this complicated place of copyright for people, Disney did not want Mickey Mouse to reach the public domain so they extended the lobbyist to have Mickey and many Disney characters to themselves. Disney found basically a loophole to the public domain and copyright legal copyright law. Smart move I would say. The only problem is that Disney is a big hypocrite when it comes to their work. Their beloved character Mickey in their first cartoon “Steamboat Willie” is an inspiration from a song and movie called “Steamboat Bill.” Not many people know about Steamboat Bill unless you really looked into the factors of the situation, the whistle tone of “Steamboat Willie” is the song itself from “Steamboat Bill” so in a sense we learned that Disney can take inspiration from many things like The Grimm Brothers and many older movies and songs, but if you try taking inspiration from them expect a lawsuit in about .5 seconds. So the judgment of the copyright situation is kind of a problem, we have fully gone into this point where if someone wants to do something they need to find loopholes around it. One of the creative aspects of creating something is taking inspiration and making something your own. But it seems like we could get into the point of really having to deal with legal issues of even taking inspiration from something. One of the things of the updated copyright law is that you can copyright phrases. As demonstrated by Taylor Swift with the phrase “This Sick Beat.” So now we are getting into a point where you have to ask for legal permission to use a phrase that is commonly used by tons of people. Disney opened this can of worms with people being allowed to be really strict with there work and how and if it can be used. Now when people copyright phrases it’s almost like the interpretation of copyright and the judgment of it can be taken as a joke. If I want to use “This Sick Beat” in a film or song, I have to now go through so many legal problems just to do that. Overall I think the problem is the interpretation and judgment that comes from and with copyright and almost how easy it is to copyright something thus allowing any creative inspiration or influence to almost be stopped from happening, not completely but in little ways people may not realize.
At first I was confused on what exactly he was talking about and I didn’t know how I would respond to this topic from Chris Anderson. But I believe after reading and watching videos more on this topic I can confidently speak on it. So Chris Anderson is talking about the “The Long Tail” effect that talks about the distribution of technology and how it gets to wide variety of audience and certain audiences. When Identifying “The Long Tail” Chris Anderson speaks on the music distribution of Rhapsody which is a legal music downloading site that my father and I have used before I switched over to ITunes. I agree with what Chris Anderson spoke about in this video because its something companies and consumers have done for years but we haven’t realized it. Chris Anderson spoke with a chart-displaying Rhapsody, the red was where you could find music both at Wal-Mart and Rhapsody, while the orange was music that was only on Rhapsody and hasn’t been released at Wal-Mart at all or hasn’t made it to the shelves. I fully understood and now agree with what Chris Anderson spoke about, as a consumer who likes to listen to his music right then and there I don’t like to wait for the album to come out and hit the shelves on music stores when I can just buy it off of a legal music site that’s right there at my computer at home.
I don’t have much of a “Long Tail” when it comes to technology of my own, but in a way I also do. After reading Chris Anderson’s magazine article, and having a basic understanding of it I do follow a “Long Tail” type of mentality that I got off my parents. There are certain stores like Best Buy that are phenomenal when it comes to camera’s and many other technological devices that would help me out. But a lot of the times Best Buy is a little bit to expensive, so I look at other sites and stores that have the same camera but for a price that I am able to spend money on. The same with books, I love Barnes and Noble but it is extremely expensive and I can find the same books on Amazon but a cheaper price which makes me happy to spend the money on the books that I like. I’ve also realized this when it comes to movies, a lot of people would rather wait for movies to be on Netflix than go to a movie theatre because they are keen on spending so much money at a movie theatre. And Netflix gets a great sum of money and consumers from that alone. I've never really thought about how technology had some sort of impact on my life but looking back at it now I can say that a lot of different things that I've done involving technology has helped shaped me into the world that I know now of videography and photography. When I was little I believe in kindergarten probably around sometime in the 90s, I got a disposable camera from my mom and I would take that to my kindergarten class and take pictures with it the entire day. I think I went through possibly 5 disposable cameras from that time period and the majority of the pictures that I would take would be me and my friends, maybe teachers, my parents, and just random things that I just found interesting. I don't even know if I got those pictures developed, I think I would just take the pictures and when the camera was done I would put it away in my drawer and get a new one from my mom. When I lived in Germany I got really into computer games, nothing really exciting but educational type of games but I was really into them . I remember playing games like Clue-Finders, Reader Rabbit, and Scooby-Doo games. Even though they were educational in some way it didn't feel educational, it felt like I was playing a video game that my dad would play in his office. I was hooked on these games, you couldn't get me off of them when I started playing them. I would probably play them the entire day during weekends and days when I didn't have to go to school. These games helped me get into other types of video games like the gameboy and the gameboy advance, I didn't start playing those till I lived in El Paso and I believe I was in the 2nd grade during this time. I was hooked on that gameboy advance, you took it away from me I hated you the entire day. There were even days where I took it to school and played with it during lunch hours or in classroom hours when I didn't have to do anything yet. I was really hooked on the Pokemon and Super Mario Bros. I even had one of the Wario games that I played a lot during that time. It didn't really come to end until I moved to Maryland and some of the games and Gameboy Advance were stolen from me the movers that helped us move up to Maryland. I still can't forgive them for that. During my middle school and high school in Maryland I was extremely hooked on video games. I didn't really hang out with people a lot during these times in my life. My parents got me a new Gameboy device and I would continue playing Pokemon on the Gameboy Advance SP, which I was hooked on and it instantly got me to become more of the Pokemon fan than I was in El Paso. I would take it everywhere with me when we went to visit family back in Texas, or whenever we went on vacation trips to wherever. I then got the Nintendo Ds which allowed me more access to these Pokemon games and some other games that I liked and my obsession grew even more. I think going into my middle school years my parents bought me a playstation 2, when I got this game system it was my new obsession during my weekends, I would play it so much that I would be in the basement playing this device from the morning time all the way till the evening time, I didn't realize how fast time was going when I was on the playstation 2. I was hypnotized by the game Kingdom Hearts, I treated it like my baby growing up and I would play the game multiply times after I finished it. I liked the game so much I think mostly because there were characters that I could relate to, also it was based off of Final Fantasy and Disney characters so it involved elements that I already loved and it just made it that much more enjoyable for me. When I got into my Senior year of high school I took a photography class as one of my electives that I needed to graduate. At first I wasn't so fond of the class because there was so much terminology that I needed to know about the camera and I just wasn't interested in that, of course my stubborn self didn't wanna pay attention to the terms because I was more interested in doing the action of photography than the paper classwork I had to do for it. But I came to love the class and I learned so much of ISO, aperture, and many other techniques that helped me out with the camera. I got my first IPad in high school going into my junior year, it was really just used at as just a social media device for me. I didn't do a whole lot on it that was really important until going into college after high school. Thats when I started using iMovie and first got into video editing. My friend had a youtube channel and she said that I should look into getting one and doing stuff on that channel. So I created one and thats when I started making videos from my iPad, editing them, and uploading them onto the channel that I created. It kind of was the start of me creating my own videos and content and I got to see how fun it was doing stuff like that. I think I connected to all these different technology based things because it was in a way my safe haven from the outside world. When I played video games I didn't have to worry about kids at school or things that bothered me a whole lot, I didn't even realize that in those parts of my life I was little bit introvert. And video games and other forms of technology just helped me feel better about myself in some cases. They also helped me more with my creative side, I grew up writing, reading, acting, singing, etc. Video games helped me get a concept of storytelling and also thinking about characters. The first stories I wrote were literally fan fictions of Pokemon, that just tells you how much of a geek I was. (Still am.) Media has mostly been my life growing up. If it was a book or notebooks. It was me spending hours watching tv, playing video games, and or hanging out on my computer all day and that has always been a part of me. Technology know is even a bigger part of my life, I create better videos with premiere pro, I'm learning a bit of special effects on affect effects, adobe story helps me with my script writing, literally everything I do now helps me out with reaching my future goal. I expect in the future for me to have a room full of camera equipment just so I'll be prepared whenever I need to go out an shoot more video or take some amazing photos. It's gonna be there throughout my life and I expect at some point for my child to hate cameras cause of how many I possibly have. I couldn't live without technology even if I truly tried to do that.
Welcome!!! I hope you all enjoy the wonderful world of photography and videography that is my blog. Explore and enjoy your time here.
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Michael E. ScalesSocial Media:
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