"Character Color Timeline"- Game of Thrones

This project involved examining how television shows used a color scheme to affect the audience's opinion of certain characters in shows.

I'd wanted to analyze the color's used in the series Game of Thrones, namely those for the character of Jaime Lannister, who goes through a lot of change through the series in the eyes of the audience. Although the timeline only covers the first season, there are a lot of costume changes that seems to work quite well with the emotion of the scenery, whether that corresponds to red making a character appear more aggressive, white making them appear vain, or blue making them appear trustworthy, there's a definite pattern in their color palettes.

 I needed to do two characters and also decided to look at the color scheme of Ser Jorah Mormont in the show, and mapped out both color schemes in an interactive timeline. You can find the timeline below. For the record, it helps to have an understanding of the show so if you haven't seen the first season you might be a bit lost or spoiled to what happens. You've been warned, mate.

I thought I'd focus on those two character because honestly they're just my favorite in the series. I could easily have done any other of the characters that have major appearances; women in particular have a lot of color use to express intent in the show and its easy to categorize what some of the colors mean according to how they are used in conjunction with banners, clothing and scenes.

The costume design is put into such great detail that it does not surprise me in the least that the series has had such renowned success. People want to suspend disbelief in a series and Game of Thrones really does just that in its presentation, and the subconscious opinion of the audience definitely plays into that.

This was really interesting to do and taught me a lot about some of the finer points of costuming. It's something I'd like to pay attention to in my career.

"Copy That, Copycat" Part 2- Inside Llewyn Davis

This project is the second part of an ongoing analysis of Coen Brothers films with regards to script and story structure. The part of the project here involved taking a third film and adding it to the analysis. 

            The second part of Copycat involved analyzing another film and comparing it on the chart. This time I chose Inside Llewyn Davis as the film. This analyzation chart will probably contain some spoilers to the movie so viewers beware.

I chose this movie because I wanted to see it pretty badly, as it looks like a brilliant film. The other reason is that in examining the movie it appears to be much shorter than the other two, which may have an effect on the writing style the Coens use for this one. Again Davis uses a different genre in this film than both of the other ones. The fact that I have not seen the film before may have an effect on the analysis, but I'll do my best.

            This one was very interesting to say the least. The graphing of the characters took a very different turn from the other films. To start, the movie was a lot shorter than the other two, so the timings for the movie were not expected to have matched up. It was also a bit harder to judge when the high moments of the film were; Inside Llewyn Davis had less action than the other two films (at least from a physical standpoint). It’s a much harder film, emotionally and also has a lot more of a human quality to it because of it.

            The biggest difference between Inside Llewyn Davis and the other two films is the placement of the Climax. I felt that playing for Grossman in the Gate of Horn was the scene that had the most tension, but it happens before the lowest point in the movie and also does not exactly signal the end of the Desis; there are more points that are complicating the plot rather than resolving it, though these points can have different interpretations. Llewyn’s choice to go into the navy and leaving that decision uncertain seem more like Desis than Lusis. The point where Davis finds out that Jean is probably swindling him for abortion money in order to continue playing at the Gaslight is definitely a turning point. 

              Inside Llewyn Davis doesn't seem to match the formula that the other movies seem to be following, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good movie. Joel and Ethan are able to create story in a remarkable amount of ways, and the style they use is incredibly versatile. I think storytelling isn't something that can be correlated into a formula. It's an interesting thought but I think the ability to write is not related to Aristotle's structure, it seems to have the elements of it yes, a beginning middle and end, but depending on the story, these can change significantly.

If you'd like to see the breakdown chart, I have it below, it does contain spoilers.

Inside Llewyn Davis: 104 mins

Set up- Introduction to Davis “Hang me”- 0-5 mins

Inciting Incident- Gorfein’s cat/Jean is Pregnant- 5-14 mins

Desis- Cat runs/ jean doesn’t know who father is- 21-25 mins

2- The Columbia session-29-35 mins

3-Diane had the baby/wrong cat-40-47 mins

4-Llewyn goes to Chicago- 47-60 mins

5- arrest on the road/ Llewyn is left on the highway- 60-64 mins

6- Gate of Horn/ Llewyn hits the cat-64-76 mins

7- Davis prepares to ship out and can’t/ meet the father- 77-87 mins

Peripeteia- Llewyn gets thrown out of the gaslight- 87-91 mins

Climax- Llewyn plays for Grossman- 65-73 mins

Lusis- Ulysses and forgiveness of Llewyn- 90-94 mins

Anagorisis- repetition of the first day- 94-99 mins (end)

Newstime Collaboration-time!

Hello all. This was not a class project for any stretch of the word but it is something I do on a regular basis.  

What I'm talking about of course is AVW Productions. AVW is the student run television association in Ohio University with a variety of shows both on and off air. I work on one of the newer shows: AVW Newstime, which entered its fifth season this semester. The show is a parody news program, made with Stephen Colbert and SNL's Weekend Update programs in mind.

AVW week just happened a short while ago which showcased AVW for the students at Ohio University. At the front of the pack was ever popular Friday's Live, who filmed a collaboration show with none other than Newstime.

I helped to write and shoot the program and digital shoot accompanying it along with the cast and crew of both Friday's Live and Newstime. The full show can be found here:

Fridays Live - Newstime Crossover!!! from AVW Productions on Vimeo.

I had a ton of fun working with everyone on this show! It made AVW week a very fun one for me and the final product was pretty great too!
Here's a link to an article in The Post about us!

http://thepost.ohiou.edu/content/avw-shows-team

I'm hoping to have more great content that I was involved with here to show off when it becomes available.

Please spread the video around, subscribe to AVW Productions, follow Newstime on twitter @AVWNewstime
 Below you'll also find the link to Newstime's brand new Youtube channel which will be uploaded with content from season 5. I will also post some of the shows I may have written, anchored or ran crew with in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCozZ30kESWUzQgS0XC_ZMeQ

"Copy That, Copycat"- Coen Brothers Films

This was a project that involved examining the story structure involved for screenwriting, which is related to Aristotle's techniques for play writing. The project involved taking a film which used award winning structure and comparing it with another film by the same screenwriter. I used "No Country for Old Men" in a previous project for award winning structure and decided to start there. 

For the award winning structure I chose No Country for Old Men, adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen for the screen. They also direct most of their movies so I decided to try and just find a movie that seemed sufficiently different enough that the direction style would be different even though the same screenwriters were heading the movie. I settled on the Big Lebowski. In my mind, the two movies lied on opposite sides of the spectrum; Lebowski is a film rooted in comedy and No Country is a thriller. Both movies also have a very different cast of characters, and the stories go in different directions as one involves a mystery and the other is a large hunt. Both movies also happen to be almost identical in timing: around 116 minutes for No Country for Old Men and 112 minutes for Big Lebowski.

I recorded when the major moments of both films happened and tried to identify what they were as best as I could. The major events of a movie can be very subjective and I chose what I felt would best fit into Aristotle's thoughts on structure. For example: Desis is defined as a complication in plot, and commonly takes place in the rising action of a story. an example of this in No Country could be when the character of Carson Wells is hired to kill Anton Chigurh, or in the Big Lebowski when the Nihilists break into the Dude's apartment and threaten him (funnily enough these two events happen within 4 minutes of each other).

I took the information from the two viewings and created a graph. The events on the bottom are what was recorded while the numbers on the left represent at what point in each movie they occurred.

 

That's amazing...

 After watching both movies and timing when moments happened in between the films, I was extremely surprised to find that they synched up incredibly well. Yes, the fact that both films were written and directed by the Coen Brothers may have had a hand in that but it should not have affected the movie that much. The timing of the two films really comes down to within one or two minutes of one another. The opening narration of the two films and set up for the story both last five minutes and multiple cases of the Desis occur very close together between the two films.

The genres of the two films are completely different, as well as the way the scripts were written. The Big Lebowski was something that was created completely by the Coen Brothers where as the story for No Country for Old Men they adapted for the screen from the novel by Cormac McCarthy. The thinking behind the adaptation would have been what to include and not to include in the film in order to shorten it into a more manageable state, while Lebowski would have called for more creative handling as a story was being more or less crafted from scratch.

The way the films are shot also makes them extremely different. For example the script for No Country has extremely little dialogue where as it’s the opposite for Lebowski. Although this is the case there is little deviation in the timing of events and the movies are only four minutes longer than one another. With the differences in shooting style and genre, one might think that the scripts would be different sizes as well however this is not the case either as the scripts are even closer in size at 117 and 118 pages! It’s also interesting the note that Lebowski is the shorter movie and yet has a longer script by a page.

Something tells me that the similarities between the timing in the movies isn’t intentional and that, psychologically, filmmakers will put events at similar times in a film because the pacing is something that the audience is used to. In all honesty, it surprised me that the films were the same length; No Country for Old Men feels like a much longer movie than the Big Lebowski, probably because of the length of scenes and the shorter dialogue. It seems like knowing that the beginning and end of a film usually are about the same length of the middle of a film makes many different movies immensely comparable. The fact that the two movies compared were made nearly ten years apart only heightens this sense of subconscious ordering and storytelling.

It is true that the Coen brothers had a huge hand in both sides of the process of scriptwriting and directing for the movie but the real fact is that these movies aren’t completely in the control of them. There’s a different story to the screenwriters, a story to the actors, and especially a story for the editors; No Country for Old Men was edited by the Coen brothers, but the other film was edited by Tricia Cooke, who had a lot of control over the length of the film because of the amount of establishing shots and not character driven shots present in the film.

If the two films had a more similar genre, I’d absolutely say that the Coen Brothers use a formulaic screenwriting technique, but as there are so many differences between them, I find it a bit harder to believe that they would think about these methods of timing during the writing process. I find it much more likely that the similarities between these films are more about a subconscious method of storytelling that more filmmakers than the Coen brothers use. If the method is formulaic, however, then the Coen brothers are very gifted in their ability to make something homogenous into very different films using a very similar structure. Looking at the graphed tables of data between the two films is very convincing for this part as well…

That was my analysis between the two films. I hope to add another film for analysis in the future (and only a little of my reasoning is for those sweet sweet creative points). 

I also have below the notes I took during the movies, in case you're interested in what I decided the major moments were in the films.

Film comparison

No Country for Old Men

Set Up: Sheriff Bell’s Narration/ Chigurh’s introduction- 0-5 mins

Inciting Incident: Finding the money/ the hunt begins- 5-25 mins

Desis:

1.     Llewellyn flees town/ Chigurh gets involved/ Sheriff Bell investigates- 25- 30 mins

2.      Chigurh, the cartels and Moss all get to hotel- 44-52 mins

3.      Carson is hired to kill Chigurh- 52-55 mins

4.      Showdown at the town inn- 55-68 mins

5.      Wells Find’s Moss/ Chigurh kills Carson 75- 84 mins

6.      Chigurh makes deal to meet Moss for final showdown-85 mins

7.     Carla Jean calls Bell and he heads for the meeting-93 mins

Peripetiea: Cartels kill Moss- 95- 102 mins

Climax: Chigurh kills Carla Jean-107-111 mins

Lusis: Bell investigates, trail runs cold, quits the dept.-102-107 mins;

Chigurh escapes-111-114 mins

Anagorisis: Bell realizes that he is a man from another age “and then I woke up”- 114-116 mins (end)

The Big Lebowski

Set Up: Narration of “The Dude”/ break in- 0-5 mins

Inciting Incident: Meeting the other Lebowski/ putting the dude on the case- 5-24 mins

Desis:

1.     Dude’s rug gets stolen/ money handoff goes south- 29-39 mins

2.     Dude’s car is stolen/ Dude meets Maude Lebowski- 39-47 mins

3.     “Bunny’s” toe cut off/ Nihilists threaten Dude- 48-56 mins

4.     Car is rediscovered/ Dude investigates Sellers kid’s house -56-73 mins

5.     Jackie Treehorn meets with Lebowski/dream sequence- 74- 85 mins

6.     Bunny has all of her toes/ Dude and Maude are lovers -85-91 mins

Peripetiea: Bunny Kidnapped herself (The Dude is the fall guy for embezzlement)-91-99 mins

Climax: face-off with the Nihilists-99-104 mins

Lusis: Donnie dies-104-109 mins

Anagorisis: The Stranger meets the Dude again, wraps up the narration-109-112 mins (end)

 

"TV 2 Game": Firefly

This project centers around taking a television show (past or present) and brainstorming ideas for one of three types of games:

 

Design a free game

for

the internet

that will draw people to the series;

 

Design a stand

alone game (for Nintendo) that spins

off from the series

 

Design a simple game for the

TV Show’s

Website that would be a fun way

for people to remember the show

 

I posted my brainstorming session and typed my thoughts on each of the four elements of game design (Story, Mechanics, Technology and Aesthetics) below. I chose one of my favorite TV series: Firefly. 

 

 

For a show like Firefly, the idea of going with a game by Nintendo may not be the best bet due to the complexity of the show. Nintendo involves using lots of interactivity with their games but the company uses games that are primarily geared for children, which would not be what Firefly would want to do. The best bet would be an immersive Internet based game and not a Nintendo or website based mini-game.

            The game would need to involve exploration of the system of planets that make up the Firefly universe. Since Firefly is also a Western spin on the science fiction genre, a game which reflects that would be a good bet.

          

  Story: The war between the Alliance and the Brown coated confederacy is over. The Alliance has brought down an iron fisted rule over the conquered systems and is forcing any former independents to retreat farther into the outer reaches of the system. You are a captain of an independent ship with the goal of settling on a new world, far from Alliance control. The Core ward worlds are where you begin as you hire a crew, sympathetic to your cause and fly your ship planet to planet. You hope to begin life anew far from Alliance control but to do so you need to travel and collect the resources you can in order to live on a hostile world. But the verse contains many dangers: the Alliance pushes ever outwards, while bandits, reavers and dangers of the cold empty darkness will press down upon you and your crew. Will you persevere? How will you be able to withstand a cold dark universe?

            Firefly has the immediately identifiable story of a western post-civil war story. The Alliance is identifiable as the Union army, seeking to combine the states back into the union, while the Confederates are the Browncoats, seeking state’s rights (though the space version of this would simply be autonomy). Outright copying the journey of Serenity and Malcolm from the show would make a game a bit too long, as there really isn’t any “end” to the journey. However, give the player an objective to settle a planet and suddenly there is an end to the game, as well as a reason for the Alliance to want to stop the player from illegally colonizing a planet. The big difference between the Union and the Alliance is that the Alliance is certifiably corrupt and iron willed about bringing outer colonies under their control. Alliance patrols should be extremely dangerous to the player. Reavers, also, are dangerous individuals. The story is that reavers travelled too far into wild space and turned into psychopaths who roamed inward to kill anyone they found. Since the reaver space is farther out than any other planet, the reavers would be a later game enemy that the player should only have to face once, a sort of risking it all tactic would be used to get past them.

           

 Mechanics: The game objective will be much like a strategy game. The character will be given choices to create a crew and ship of their own, based largely upon many of the ships and characters found in the TV show. For example there would be medics, engineers, pilots and other manner of characters that may be useful on the journey. The player would choose the set of characters that they feel is most useful and a ship that they like and start to blaze a trail towards the edge of the large solar system (which will serve as the game space). The goal is to find a suitable planet that is far from Alliance control in which to settle and have the means and materials to do so once you get there.

 There are many planets to chose from, however you must travel farther out in the system to be successful. Settle a planet too close to the core and you may not have explored enough to collect useful material; you will also increase the danger that Alliance poses to the colony you create. If you are too close to Alliance territory they will commandeer the planet for expansion and your colony will be forfeit. It is in your best interest to explore as much as you can before settling a planet in order to collect goods, rations, and possibly even crew to survive. But exploring too much also poses a danger; if a planet is explored or settled too far out of the system’s core, then you run the risk of the colony or ship being attacked by reavers. If you settle a planet and it is: attacked by reavers, militarized by the Alliance, or starves to death because you lacked enough material, its game over.

So the goal is to avoid both Alliance territory and reaver space, while collecting enough material and fuel to get to a suitable planet and survive. Your ability to get to the planet and avoid confrontation in one piece is the majority of the game play. The ability to settle the planet successfully and how the colony will prosper determine the endgame (which is a score tally of sorts). The final product is that you will see if your effort has paid off. Along the way there will be trials that test the limits of the ship and crew you create. The ship can be destroyed and members of your crew can be killed, both of which will hurt your chances of surviving the trip and creating the colony. The ship can run out of fuel, or a situation can result in the capture of the ship by the Alliance if too many risks are taken.

 The real inspiration is here is that the mechanics are similar to the older game The Oregon Trail, though updated and rehashed to fit the style of Firefly. The random nature of the game would play into this as well. Every play through would feature different events that could be solved in different ways, with different consequences. For example, much like an episode in the series, an event could occur in which a derelict ship is found with a lone survivor. If a medic is present in the crew, he can heal the survivor. But many different outcomes of this could happen; the survivor could die, he could join the crew, he could go crazy from a traumatic experience and kill a crew member, or report the ship to an Alliance patrol and get some of the crew’s supplies taken away, or he could even give supplies in exchange for fuel to get the derelict ship home

 Technology: The technical aspect of the game would be turn based. The player would have a limited choice of crew and ship enhancements to be chosen from in the core worlds. The user would then start to engage the jump drive and travel between systems. The system would probably have something like 30 planets to chose from. Of those 30 planets around 15 would be habitable enough to form a colony, but all would have different events that would help or hinder the user when they arrive. The planets can all be explored, but of the 15 habitable planets, there is are roughly five that would lie within Alliance territory and another three that would be in wild space and within reaver influence. That would leave a total of seven planets that would be suitable for colonization, which seems to be the lucky number that is enough that the player would not have trouble finding the planet and not so much that it would be too easy to find one after finding the necessary material to get there.

The player would be able to arrive in a system and the information regarding the planet would come up. The information would give some backstory to the planet but more importantly it would tell the player if the planet was habitable. The player would then have the choice of whether to colonize the planet or to move on. 

Before he can do so, however, the player must go through a randomized event that occurs in the system. The event would involve choice where the player chooses an outcome based upon the nature of the event, the crew and ship he has available, and what materials they need to continue. The result can be achieved in one of two ways. If the player has a specialized crewmember or ship enhancement, then often times the event will turn out favorably. For example, using an engineer to repair a damaged ship will result in material or perhaps a ship enhancement being salvaged from the ship, whereas trying to repair the ship without a specialized crewmember may result in the ship exploding and killing the crew as the nature becomes much more random. Choices that are made like the Mass Effect games keep linearity to the storyline, but can posit many different outcomes to a situation.

 The random nature of choices makes specialized crewmembers and enhancements more desirable as they lower the chances of losing crewmembers and material due to events that turn out badly. The key to the game is simplicity; the events which occur are only relying on a computer dice roll which determines whether an action is successful, as well as a simple point and click interface in order to make choices. The technology should be able to function on any computer, since it’s an Internet based game, it shouldn’t be as large as a full sized game. That’s why the working needs to be simple.

 The game Oregon Trail could fit on 1 floppy disk, containing at most 200 Megabytes, which would easily fit into an Internet based medium on today’s computers. The technology tried and true and with a reemergence of the importance of choice-style interactivity in games, the game could become popular with the target audience of the show of Firefly: those being people who are at an age where they were able to experience games like the Oregon Trail as a kid and then are in their twenties when the show was premiering. The game serves as a nostalgia trip as well as an interesting tie in to the firefly universe, all of it more attainable (as well as accessible and entertaining for today's demographic) than a copy of the Oregon Trail.

 Aesthetics: The Firefly universe contains a delicate mix of western themes and science fiction ones. The combination of holsters, horses and breeches, and exposed engine parts, nebulae and lasers makes it a winning one. It’s the same type of feel that made Star Wars so popular. The feel should be one that reflects that of the show. The clothing is full of utilitarian straps, belts, holsters and suspenders in rustic colors. The ships are much the same, with engines, enhancements, and parts being put on mostly based on function. There are no incredibly sleek ships to be found here. The Alliance ships have retained the right to use the best technology and would have ships that would reflect that with much more aesthetically pleasing birds.

The kind of look that would accompany Firefly would also carry over in the form of its music. The music of Firefly is one that really would fit in a post civil-war America and the music of the game would have to feature the same sort of lazy, western feel. A violin would be a fiddle and slide guitars would be prevalent. The show’s music could actually be reused in the game format, but it might be better to recompose music or transfer the music to an 8-bit format. The reason for this is because the game would require enough music to go in the background while the player interacts with a system. Looping tracks and making them simpler would be very necessary in order to achieve the length needed to last the entirety of the game.

Along with the music, the graphics need to match the quality. Since the game is on the Internet, realistic graphics are limited to pictures of planets appearing on a scanner. The rest would have to be stylized and pixelated art, coupled with minor movements to keep the different screens from getting stale. The idea is to couple the fact that the graphics may be lacking with exciting story events to draw the mind away from the fact that the game is from the Internet. That doesn’t mean that the graphics would be bad, mind you. Plenty of pixelated games can be very pretty; the idea of minimalism is what drives this. Games like Minecraft and Faster Than Light achieve this excellently.