User talk:Badfishpond

'Project Notes for the Bad Fish Pond'
Q1

--This is a diagram to demonstrate the typical structure of a film narrative--

Expositions – Set the scene and introduce the characters

Development – The situation develops and more characters are introduced

Complication – Something happens to complicate the lives of the characters

Climax – a decisive moment is reached, matters come to a head

Resolution – matters are resolved and some sort of satisfactory end is reached

Also there is a Theory put forward by Vladimir Prop a Russian critic and theorist, that there are eight distinct character roles in any in any story, although multiple role can be played by a single character. These are:

The Villain – The rogue of the piece

The Hero – A character trying to find or accomplish something, the person who carries the events

The Donor – Provides a necessary object for the events

The Helper – who aids the hero

The Princess – reward for the hero

Her Father – who rewards hero

The Dispatcher – who sends the hero on his way

The False Hero – A peony champion

Memento is a cleverly developed piece of media that plays with the viewers understanding of a films standard Narrative structure, a closed narrative generally. The Movie is told from a very personal way, it is like understanding how the main character sees things around him; all in short term bursts of visuals. The structure of the movie is a variation on the regular sequence of events that would occur over telling a story. The movie quiet literally starts at the end and leaves the viewer initially wondering how they got there. The film then gradually progresses backwards unravelling the events displaying the scenes inversely. The movie also has randomly scattered black and white scenes that progress through the film in the correct sequential order, this then throws the viewer even further which. It does help created a strange level of clarity though by giving the user a standard resolution to the events unfolding, but it comes in the middle of the chronological time line, which is nearly the end of the movie which blends seamlessly from black and white into colour as the events come together.

The movie tells of a man (Leonard) suffering from a type of short-term memory loss trying to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. Along the way he tries to deal with his disability and the characters he is repeatedly meeting. The some of the roles of the movies can be clearly interpreted. Others on the other hand are a lot less apparent as their roles change over the course of the movie.

The Villain is the murderer, John G, who killed the wife and cause Leonard’s amnesia

The Hero is obviously Leonard, on a quest to find his wife’s killer.

The Donor can be seen as Leonard on his own, as he gives himself the Polaroid’s and tattoos to remember his past.

The Helper is Teddy who is a detective who puts Leonard on the trail of the Killer, or so we are initially led to believe

The Princess is Natalie, a seemingly sad and defenceless woman who we discover to be manipulating Leonard to her own ends.

The Father, although not in a conventional sense can be interpreted as Dodd the man who beat Natalie, and the one she convinces Leonard to try kill, but for Leonard the reward of Natalie will come from beating Dodd

The Dispatcher, Is again Teddy who puts Leonard in search of John G, But we later discover that he keeps doing this again and again manipulating him into killing multiple people he claims are John G. He does claim however that he did help him find John G originally though.

The False Hero, Leonard is his own false hero as the story becomes clearer we discover that he has been killing multiple people who he though was John G, even though he was misguided at the end of the movie he admits that he wants to forget something’s and remember others.

Q2

Although it is generally seen nowadays that copyright is a form of censorship, I do not believe that this is the case in all circumstances although to this date there seems to be no happy medium available. The idea behind copyright is that it is a set of rights granted by governments to control the use of an idea or information. The problem being that although a person may want to protect his or her own idea, it leaves way for a good idea being turned into a monopoly and slowing the overall development of people at large. But without copyright no one could lay claim to their creation and anyone can steal or mimic an idea that’s not theirs. In most countries copyright only covers actual physical creations, like movies, music or art for example, but some countries have intellectual property laws that protect the ideas or techniques involved in the work. The concept of intellectual property has only arisen in the last decade or so. Modern technology makes it so easy to mass-produce text, sound, and images, that it is now inexpensive to reproduce and sell the creative works of others without paying for the privilege. People who originally created those works deserve protection from pirates. Clearly fictional works belong to their creators, but what about facts? Are facts intellectual properties? Could Einstein have charged for the use of the theory of relativity, and if he had imaging how much longer it would have taken for certain scientific theories to arise. This is an area only beginning to be addressed. So in understanding this we can see although the concept of copyright can be abused as a method of enforcing censorship, copyright is in itself not censorship.

With the ever-growing popularity of the Internet the latest philosophy to arise is the theory of open source. Open source is a where the end product’s source material is left available for anyone who wishes to develop it further. It has been in operation for years but only in recent years became an accepted term for the practice. Linux next to Windows is the most widely used Operating System in the world and it functions on an open source theory allowing users to alter the code and add patches and updates as they see fit. Netscape now uses an Internet browser called Mozilla that is open source as part of its business strategy. The theory is so popular that is has even spread to other forms of media with Open forums online where people display art, music and other creations for others to add onto. It has even spread into medical development being used for research into Neglected diseases.

The overall argument is that open source licensing has indeed changed the ways the software industry thinks of and actually uses intellectual property. Almost all major software companies in the world have since 1998 started to adopt open source licensing models as part of their business plans. Open source has made inroads to the intellectual property licensing practices of industry heavyweights. It may be that in some application areas like in Internet software there are no long-lasting mass markets in the future for closed source code software products with restricting licensing terms. But still in many sectors of the software industry such as custom software development and certain industry applications open source is still a non-issue.

Linus Torvalds the creator of Linux has said in regards that Linux’s General Public License (GPL) might not be honoured:

”My fears are mitigated by reality. Somebody might do it for awhile, but it is the people who actually honour the copyright, who feed back their changes to the kernel and have it improved ... By contrast, people who don’t honour the GPL will not be able to take advantage of the upgrades, and their customers will leave them. I hope.” Actual legal conflicts and license violations have been noticeably rare taking into account the popularity of open source. This has been mainly accredited to a community with self-control and effective mutual conflict resolution. Investigations into the possibilities and business effects of the new innovative licensing techniques are ongoing.

With open source expanding into so many diverse areas and from open cola (a cola brand that show you how to make it) to the tropical disease initiative (an open source pharmaceutical development), open source has defiantly evolved into a worldwide philosophy from a method of developing software. Being adopted as a business strategy and a personal strategy alike, it could defiantly be a method by which to counter the arguments of copyright as censorship.

Q3

Fine Gael – http://www.finegael.ie

Graphic Design & Use of Media

This site is designed with a fixed layout, fixed means it’s a pre-defined size that does not stretch to the screen size or oversize itself (the opposite of a fixed size is liquid). Fixed is generally seen to be a lot more user friendly to view but less stylish. But this does mean it keeps its layout and structure throughout the pages. It is a standard Form with a menu down the left hand side and a title bar with the extra icons to the right, which give the illusion of balance to the page. The rolling news in the title bar is a nice touch, but the Left hand menu bar seems overloaded with tabs and not very well broken into groups. The colour blending of green and blue is a good match, blue dividers with a fine green trim, looks clean and business like and also matches their logo nicely. The actual creation of the dividers is a little rough though as the curve on the white lines is not evenly matched giving it a rough grainy look. The menus have a great colour scheme to match the site, but the use of plan black text on a white background for a site with a lot of reading is a bad idea, an off white would work better, making it easier to read, and Black and White text is seen a common reason for promoting problems with dyslexics as it can be what triggers the problem so for a mass appeal site it not a great idea, also they keep using different fonts sizes on the same page, which takes away from the consistency of the sites look.

Navigation and Interactivity

The menu is the main navigational feature with nice rollovers but a little over crowed, and although there are quick icons on the top of the page they are not very pronounced and have no rollover.

Audience Address

The Labour Party – http://www.labour.ie

Graphic Design & Use of Media

Form (shape, line, dot) Texture Color (or hue) Value (light and dark) Space (actual and virtual) Time (first, second, last...)

Navigation and Interactivity

Audience Address