Participatory culture~

Personally, i'm all for participatory culture, because I like to be able to think that I am capable of doing anything that anyone else is doing (with various biological restrictions of course). So as i'm browsing the web (as I invariably do from time to time) and a large majority of this browsing is done on one of my favorite websites - http://www.deviantart.com  This website is 'digital art' website, while it does not contain such colourful forms of digital art such as those we were shown in our last lecture for this subject. It does contain images, and lots of them. While I was browsing one day, I stumbled across some pieces of 'remix culture' that I felt I was able to take part in. Manga Colouring.

Essentially manga is a japanese comic. Except they are read from back to front and are black & white. I read a lot of manga in my spare time. Sometimes I just sit there reading through them when i'm trying to relax and think 'what would that look like if it was in colour?' This is because I like to explore the potential of something. To see where its limits are.   

College helped me learn a basic to intermediate knowledge of Abobe Photoshop. This is the program I use to colour the manga cells/pages. 

But of course, anyone can colour in some pretty pictures right? Not in my opinion, the way I do it is by using some detailed shading to try and make it look as realistic as possible, while still staying true to the Cell Shading style.

http://playrone.deviantart.com/art/WIP-Cover-379-95669789

Above, we have an example of one of my previous manga colouring projects from about two years ago. As you can see, the bottom two faces have a 'basic' colour down on the lines, where as the top one has a higher level of detail.


Naruto 379 Cover by *Playrone on deviantART


This is the finished result. While it's not the best verison of this particular page you'll find on the internet,  I also believe that it is very good considering my experience at the time.

There are other things involving photoshop that I like to do in my spare time, which I also believe to come under the tag of 'participatory culture', but this is more of a test of my own ability than me exploring the potential of something to its limits, while it is, the reasons I do these is to test myself and to learn new things. 

Tutorials. These can be found on hundreds and hundreds of websites on the internet. This is where someone with the knowledge of some techniques in photoshop, want to share what they have learned with the rest of the world for free. Because while photoshop isn't a free program, knowledge should be something free. Nothing makes me happier than when i'm sitting at home trying to teach myself something new in photoshop. 

http://i45.tinypic.com/2f0cfmr.png

This is the profit of a tutorial I stumbled upon one night I was browsing tutorials. While i would link the tutorial, I cannot actually find it anymore, but I can safely say that I had no idea of how to do this before I started to read the tutorial. But I am incredibly proud of this one, because it just looks so good, I want to use it on my poster assignment for our photography module.

Copyright and Remix Culture.

This week we are doing presentations about Remix culture, the class was divided up into three groups and we were each given a different subject to research and write a presentation about.

My group was group 2: We had to study remix culture and consider arguments about what would happen to remix culture if copyright laws were to change.

Personally, I did some research on mash up bands, such as girl talk --





I found out about this band because of the 'rip 2.0' article found on this website;

http://www.opensourcecinema.org/project/rip2.0

  After doing this, I started a little research about copyright infringement in general and I found out that agencies in the United States believe that over 30 percent of all software is illegally obtained with in the U.S.


I then went on to talk about how there is copyright free media on the web, but it's not as good as the things you can 'steal' from the professional artists that do it for a living. But while saying that, the royalty free media is also useful for flash projects.


With that being said, free media isn't all that bad. You can also get hold of copyright free sound effects, for use in small films or flash movies for example.

Film remixes such as; http://www.angryalien.com/

These are 30 second flash movies summarising blockbuster movies with the characters altered into the form of rabbits. This is the same as the mash up remixes. while this is a new movie, it's essentially copying the movie while adding a new twist on to it. No real new content, except for them being condensed into a very short version and into a vector based animation.


But then you have to think, as long as all of this content is being publish in a totally public forum, such as the internet and more specifically, youtube and similar mediums, where the creators of the media are not profiting from the remixes, but just doing it because they can, is that really a problem?


The Itallics above are an extract from my notes on the subject.