Final Touches and Prep

Over the past few days I’ve been putting the final touches to the video. Things are finally looking complete after all our hard work. We finally found a track to go with our video so it seems more like the finnish product now. The preparation, albeit tough work, I feel has really improved a lot of skills for me. I feel my team work skills have improved from collaborating with Ania on the material we chose and writing it all up on google docs. Also I’ve learned quiet a bit about video editing and presenting which im sure will be very beneficial in future presentations I will be a part of, hopefully this process will continue and eventually i’ll be able to offer a presentation of a professional standard. Also from preparing my speech and practicing it infront of various audiences i feel my public speaking skills have improve, even if it’s just a little, it’s still a very important skill in all walks of life. Anyway, I’m looking forward to the presentation, our final day! Hopefully everything will go according to plan. I doubt this will be the last i see of second life as i have really enjoyed the experience.

See you on the other side!

Mino

Preparation for Presentation!

Over the past couple of weeks myself and my partner, Anu55, have been preparing for our final presentation. A lot of time and effort has been spent in order to produce an effective representation of our time in SL and what SL means to it’s users.

Firstly, Anna and I met in the real life to thrash out some ideas on the content we would be using in the presentation. Luckily enough, we both had some similar ideas of what we wanted to show and we agreed on a theme for our presentation. We decided to make a poster and short video, Anna, being a graphic design student, was well suited to designing the poster, so I undertook the video editing. For the next couple of weeks we met in second life to discuss our progress and also to record video footage of content we needed. In our video we wanted to show how SL can adequately represent many RL features such as music,art and socialising. Also aspects it can represent that RL cannot, like the many fantasy landscapes that are created in SL. Our search for this content brought us to Art galleries, Live music gig’s, nightclubs and many weird and wonderful places!. We spent a lot of time talking to the artist, Rob Barber, and the musician, Jaynine Scarborough. They gave us a very interesting talk on their work in SL and RL and also their views on what life in SL is all about. After this chat we felt we had a better understanding of where we wanted to take our presentation.

We have run into a couple of problems thus far. When recording video footage for the first time, i forgot to register the software so we were left with a big ugly ‘DEMO’ sign on top of an hours work! So off we went to shoot it again and about an hour and 20 minutes later the computer crashed and we were back to square one… again. Third time lucky, I decided to record only short clips and process them to video files individually, it took more time but unlike the last two attempts it worked! So at this stage im trying to make a coherent visual representation if you will! out of the footage, photos and slides we have made. Hopefully by my next post, everything will be ready for the big screen!

Group Work

In the last class we found out that we will need to create a showcase as part of assessment for the virtual environments module, and that we can use all forms of media to express our ideas. This really excited me as i had loads of ideas for this. We were also put into groups, and i found out that Anu55 was my partner. We decided to meet in real life soon to discuss plans. Hopefully she will have some thoughts and ideas that will work with mine. The theme for the presentation is virtuality so luckily there is plenty of scope!

Mino

Intellectual Property

In last weeks class our group discussed aspects of intellectual property and copyright. It became evident from the offset that none of us had substantial knowledge on Copyright and what to do if the case arises where someone has stolen your work. One of our classmates; Q shared her experience with us. She explained how she saw one of her photo’s in an advert for a very popular clothing brand and had not given any permission to the company to use it. On that note our mentors assigned us the task of researching the area of intellectual property and copyright so we could be well prepared if we ever found ourselves in a situation like Q’s.

Intellectual property is defined as; “A product of the intellect that has commercial value, including copyrighted property such as literary or artistic works, and ideational property, such as patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes” (Thefreedictionary.com, 2012). The key term here being copyright property such as literary or artistic works. As we are all students of various creative courses, our product is primarily intellectual property of some sort, it is essential that our work is protected.

At the bare minimum the creator should put the following phrase at the bottom of their work; Copyright (Year) (Legal Name). All Rights Reserved. This may not suffice, To have an enforceable copyright, the creator should file their work with the copyright office. This gives you protection legally but seen as intellectual property theft is classed as a civil matter and not criminal it is advisable to use other deterrents of theft on your work. Monitoring programs like Copyscape or Google alert are useful as they monitor the web for copies of work you have kept on the net.(freelanceswitch.com)

So it has come to your attention that someone has copied your work. The first step should be to take a snapshot of the copied work and print a hard copy, this will be essential if legal action is taken. You should then send an email to the offender asking the person to remove it. If this doesn’t work try get the offenders mailing address through their website and send a formal letter reiterating their misconduct. After that stage, you could file a notice of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement with Google and the other major search engines.(freelanceswitch.com). It is quiet a bit of work but if successful the offenders website will be removed from the search engines thus damaging his website’s hits count and credibility heavily. If this fails to work you have to weigh up the costs of taking a civil case to courts versus the value of the work stolen. Its a harsh reality but nobody can afford to be bankrupt in pursuing a case.On a lighter note I feel It has been very beneficial researching this topic and I feel as a student of the creative industries, it will prove very useful in future career paths.

 

Sources:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/intellectual+property

http://freelanceswitch.com/freelancing-essentials/what-to-do-when-someone-steals-your-work/

The Search For New Friends

Our task for class three involved making contact with people of similar interests to that of our own. So i opened up the search box in the SL viewer and entered my two most beloved areas of interest; music and sport. From here, finding a starting point became difficult, the first obvious thing i needed to do was to narrow down the scope a bit as the results I was getting proved way too broad. So I decided to concentrate on my favorite aspects; Liverpool Football Club and my favorite genre in music; reggae.

Upon searching the term Liverpool FC, I found a number of supporters groups and joined a couple of them. Although I could not seem to find a place associated with the club in order to try chat to fellow supporters so my quest for new friends came to an abrupt halt in this area. So I turned to finding places associated with reggae music. Firstly, I came across a couple of empty clubs that played reggae, There settings were quiet similar, each club’s colour theme was the Rastafarian red green and yellow and most of them were located beside a beach. After a couple of teleports, I finally found a place occupied by Life form. Cann!bal Island was the venue’s name, It was a bar/hangout spot, naturally located on a beach. Here, i started to chat to a girl from France. She was a perfect candidate for the purpose of this assignment as she enjoyed sports and music. after asking her why she enjoyed using Second Life she responded ” You can be who you want to be, that is the dream”, She was a perfect example of ‘personal branding’ that we discussed in class previously. After discussing Football and music for a bit we parted ways, I truly felt I had met a new friend!

First Impressions.

We arrived at virtual DIT for our first class. I was impressed at how we had our own classroom  and how, visually, The school resembled Aungier street. Sound issues hampered our first class as a lot of us, myself included, could not hear the lecturer’s voice and as a result, we had to make do with the chat box. We were brought through the basics of SL and the class concluded by a visit to the pub, which unfortunately, I got lost along the journey. I took it upon myself to have a look around and it became very evident how vast Second Life is, it really is a second world.

Having missed the jazz event, I decided to check out a few clubs myself, keeping in line with the theme of this weeks task. After a quick look through the event guide in the sidebar, I teleported to a place called Club 6. Here I was met by a rep for the club, explaining how great it is and giving me the low down on the rules of the place. This reminded me of going out when on holidays. The club was full of people dancing and they were helpful in explaining to me how to dance. During my time here, the chat box was constantly being bombarded  with comments like “wooohooo” and “dance dance dance!!”, It was a surreal environment I must say, but good fun all the same. I visited another club in virtual Ibiza which was set on a beach of course but there was not much happening here, probably due to the time of day.

First Impressions of SL is that it’s users really engage in the role play of their avatar, They really strive to make SL as real as possible and do a good job of it. After seeing a bit of SL’s nightlife, I’m looking forward to seeing how other aspects of life are portrayed.

Mino89