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Case Study #1: Analysing Away We Happened

  By weiyunsoo • March 14, 2015

Away We Happened

 

Link: Away We Happened-Episode 1

I just did a summary of this case study in my previous blog post. I thought that everyone’s presentation was so good that I should do another. So we will be looking at why I think this web series should be categorised as an online video. I believe that this mini web series has been catered for the Internet because they are looking for participation through this interactive short. Let’s take a look at some of the criterias:

1. Style/Genre
This series is a rom-com with fast paced cuts, quick and witty with a few cheesy sappy conversations. Sarcastic comments are thrown in as well.

2. Duration
The first episode was about 7 minutes long to introduce the characters. There are more characters introduced into the series later on. The rest of the episodes are about five minutes long ending with a 14-minute episode finale.

3. Audience
Wong Fu Production’s fan base consist of young teenagers who spend most of their time surfing the net. Wong Fu Productions have 2.4 million subscribers so AT&T users are combined with these young fans that this web series raked up 6-million views in six weeks.

4. Is it online video?
 bI think that this style of content is catered for the Internet because they are short and just for pleasure. This is a low budget series as well. With the interactive aspect, the votes are all done online under AT&T.

5. Reason
The reason of this collaboration is for AT&T to do crowdsourcing as well as product placement for HTC. The quality of the video is at a professional level but if you check the past videos of Wong Fu Production, they worked their way up to this professional level,

6. Involvement
This series is to gather participation from the audience to submit ideas of how to continue to story. The ideas are then posted to be voted and the most voted will be the next episode. This style of interaction intrigues me because this actually allows filmmakers to know what the audience want to see in a story. Who would go for the more cheesy story lines or the more quirky and funny story lines.

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What interests me in this case study is that I enjoy how they incorporated the participatory aspect in this interactive series. The multi-narrative side of this film intrigues me. Those multi-linear interactive commercials catches my interest as well. This has a slightly simpler style of interaction because you vote for the next episode instead of choosing to ‘run away from the bear’ or ‘dine with the bear’.

 

That’s it then!

Do the happy Jen dance!

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Case Study #1: Summary – Away We Happened

  By weiyunsoo • March 11, 2015

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Introducing… Away We Happened (2012) by Wong Fu Productions and AT&T !

 

Why this video?
I have been a huge fan of Wong Fu Production so I decided to use this film as my case study. Wong Fu consists of three Asian-American who graduated from the same college about ten years ago and they moved to Los Angeles to start a company. They are mainly on YouTube making short skits and some short films – varies from comedy to drama. They have a huge fan base with 2.4 million subscribers. Their audience are mainly young teenagers who spend most of their time on YouTube.

What is this video?
It is a web series called ‘Away We Happened‘ and it stars celebrity YouTube artists like Victor Kim, Jen Buescher, Ki Hong Lee and so on. This mini series is revolves around the relationship of this couple, Daniel and Jean who had their suitcase swapped by accident at a cafe in New York. They met up to return the respective suitcase and their love story bloomed from there.

This show is not fully scripted during pre-production because Wong Fu made this an interactive video so they film the first episode and they give the viewers to continue the story. They will put a list of questions for the people to answer at the end of each episode. At the end of the week, they will vote the best way to continue the film and Wong Fu will post the next video. The series ran for six weeks with six episodes. Each episode is about 5-7 minutes long with the finale running up to 14 minutes long. It is naturally the standard online video duration – short and concise.

Is this series sponsored?
This was a collaboration film of Wong Fu Production with AT&T. It was a low-budget film sponsored by AT&T. Product placement advertising is very heavy here because throughout the video the phones are extremely visible. AT&T used this collaboration as a crowdsourcing tactic as there are plenty of young viewers watching Wong Fu’s films. Within the 6 weeks of the web series, AT&T gathered six million views.

 

For further analysis, I posted it on my next blog post. Check it our here !

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OVE Studio: Day ONE !

  By weiyunsoo • March 6, 2015

After two weeks of summer break, I am finally back to blogging! I think ever since that intensive course with Networked Media, I found that blogging isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Anyways, let’s move along to the topic for today!

Online. Video. Experiments – Experimenting videos that are available on the Internet. I picked this class to learn the various online videos practices. I believe that with technology these days, the videos online are spreading like wildfire. I want to understand the hype of all these.

I came into class with an empty mind, I probably ended class with an empty mind as well. I have to admit that this studio concept is all new to me that it probably was a little confusing. Just a little recap.

1) We are having a new learning concept – ‘practice based research’.

2) We will be doing blog reflections to keep our research progressing daily

NUMBER ONE! The thing that caught my interest is that we would be experimenting  on online video practices. That means we make an online video from scratch and research on it instead of just analysing past projects. My lecturer had mentioned something related to this practice before and it opened my learning tremendously. Copying someone’s style of editing is not cheating but more of a learning process and if you are more creative, find easier and a more effective way to edit it.

NUMBER TWO! Seth had mentioned in class about the importance of reflection. I find this technique rather useful. It is just writing things that comes to your head to keep it visible for you. The good thing about these reflections are they are not formal academic writings and you can always come back to edit the information or add more when you come across the same topic again.

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Cover Songs – Copyright Infringement?

  By weiyunsoo • February 8, 2015

Following YouTubers really closely, ever wondered how their videos never got taken down from YouTube for singing covers? Or even getting sued for selling covers? It definitely plagued my mind for a bit and then I finally got out of my procrastination mode and searched for answers.

First, what is a cover song? Simply put, it is a song which is not owned and written by you and you perform or record it. You are doing a cover of a famous song! In order to cover the song without getting sued, a certain payment has to be made.

A cover song is the everyday term for a song that is being performed or recorded by a different artist(s) than the one that wrote it or the one that first made it famous… According to the law, once a song subject to U.S. Copyright has been recorded and distributed publicly, anyone can obtain a license and record the song, and pay statutory royalty rates. –Sue Basko

Sue Basko, an expert lawyer in the musics and creative businesses in California and Illinois wrote a full detailed post on cover songs. It finally opened up my understanding on the laws. If you want to record ans sell your songs you need a license called ‘mechanical license’.

A mechanical license is the compulsory license that allows you to record and sell someone else’s song in the U.S., and in exchange you pay royalties to the songwriter at statutory rates, which is 9.1 cents per copy for songs 5 minutes and less. For songs longer than 5 minutes, it is 1.75 cents per minute, rounded up. – Sue Basko

As far as I know, some of the local artists may not even have bought license to cover the songs. As long as they put a disclaimer (and maybe not get any money from it), I guess it could be possible that they will allow the musicians to cover the song or maybe they are just lucky for now.

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Life Feature: Gardiner Sisters

  By weiyunsoo • February 8, 2015 ,

I have always been a fan of music that gives the chills and goosebumps! The ones that grabs my attention are the harmonies and those belters. I came across a group of girls who gave me chills when they did their own rendition of ‘Only Hope’ by Switchfoot / Mandy Moore for the film A Walk To Remember. Those girls are…. (DRUM ROLL PLEASE)

THE GARDINER SISTERS!

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Gardiner sisters are sisters(obviously…), Hailey, Allie and Mandi Gardiner. They are the main people in this channel but they have special appearances with their younger sisters Lindsay and Abby. They are very down to earth people and their quirky, entertaining personality keeps me laughing throughout the whole video. They have a separate channel to upload their vlogs – video logs.

People always wonder if artists have a terrible personality and they are just faking it in front of camera. The interesting thing about independent artists are they do not have such restrictions on their image so you can usually find them doing silly things as the camera keeps rolling. They would even do bloopers videos for us to see. Independent artists rely on these videos to connect them with their fans and give something back to them.

I tend to appreciate more of the independent artists because of the originality and they are quite easy to connect. I would say that the local artists are like super heroes and we should help support the arts. They are more normal and they make us feel like they are just like one of us whereas the celebrities make us feel like they are a whole world apart from us. Something to ponder about – are people in front of the camera the same as they say they are?

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To Share! Week 4

  By weiyunsoo • February 2, 2015

Emerald Cowell had written a piece on Selective Information which is the same topic of my Different Perspective. Her take on this piece was an eye opener because I definitely did not realise that each perspective on the current issue was selective. Bishop had mentioned on her best wishes on the new President of Afghan while the other perspective was on the president’s wish for the Australian military personnel to stay. Selecting information is led by bias feelings or could be because the news agency is controlled. A question to ponder, where is the truth in these newspapers?

Allison also wrote a good insight on Peer Reviewed and Journalistic sources. Peer reviewed are definitely more researched in a sense of hypertext because the research they have done links to many sources and we can further understand the current topic. Journalistic sources are more to back up your findings as they are proven and written by scholars.

 

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Life Feature: Once Upon A Time

  By weiyunsoo • February 2, 2015 ,

 

 

 

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Life feature segments shall be the start of what I have been doing the couple of weeks. Recently I have been addicted to this series called Once Upon A Time. I initially thought it was just a fairy tale story with all the princesses and happy endings so I did not bother watching the series. However, I watched the first episode and I was drawn to it. They brought story book fairy tales into our modern world, making the characters cross dimensions. I was so impressed by the concept and I definitely had to give credits to the two people who created this series, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis. The characters were smoothly interlinked and they definitely gave more suspense to the stories. Just a heads up, whatever you knew or thought you knew of fairy tales, will not be the same as this series! The drama and suspense keeps me watching episode after episode and before you know it, 4 hours have passed! I literally binged on this series and there are four seasons currently.

 

What I enjoyed from the series is that even the bad can be good and the good can turn bad as well. The famous quote from the series was ‘a villain is just another person whose story has not been told’. I gave that some thought and I realised it was true because villains normally seek vengeance and feels nothing more than hatred. In order to feel that way, there must be a story behind the negative feelings they felt. Watching this show definitely showed me that in life, we do not know what the future brings but the only positive way is to hope and never give up. The series definitely have its moral values just like they do in fairy tale books. Although, this series does have dark and rated concepts as compared to the fairy tales we normally watch. I found it quite hilarious when they mentioned to their Mulan back in the Enchanted Forest that they watched a movie of her in the real world. Keeping the reality of our world and meshing it with storybook characters was an interesting concept. I definitely cannot wait for the next season.

 

 

 

 

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News Sources from Different Perspective

  By weiyunsoo • February 2, 2015

There are plenty of news channels or print media that cover the same current affair daily. Unfortunately, with various perspective of the issue, we tend to speculate and become skeptical. Who can we trust now? In class, we were given two news articles by The Guardian and The Australian on the meeting with the new president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani and Australia’s Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop. It is then I realised that even media can have different perspective because we have plenty of broadcast journalists and reporters out there. I learned that we rely heavily reuters or news agencies back in my home country as they are the ones that have reporters everywhere and are reporting back to this company and all broadcast channels go through them. Reuters is an international news agency but for our country, we normally used our local distributor which is Bernama for current affairs and Associated Press (AP) for sports. When we read articles produced by my country’s main newspaper like The Star or New Strait Times we can see the word ‘Bernama’ or ‘Reuters’ after some articles to prove that their source of information was from them.

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For now, I did some comparison between the two articles that were given during class. It was written with completely different perspective. We know from the perspective of what the President of Afghanistan wanted and a direct statement from Australian Foreign Minister.

Afghanistan’s new President has urged the West to stay involved in his country – including militarily – longer than the planned withdrawal date at the end of next year in a meeting with Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop. – The Guardian, 2015

FOREIGN Minister Julie Bishop has made a surprise visit to Afghanistan to meet with Australian military personnel and new Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. -The Australian, 2015

These two articles from different newspaper covered different perspective on the issue. The Guardian had stated that the new President of Afghanistan had urged the Australian military to stay as they had a meeting with the foreign minister, Julie Bishop on this matter. On the other hand, The Australian had stated that Bishop took a surprise trip to Afghanistan to visit the military personnel and new president, Ashraf Ghani.

 

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Cafe Hopping – How did that start?

  By weiyunsoo • January 26, 2015

So my friend and I went around Fitzroy, eating our way through the area. We literally went cafe hopping to five places in a span of six hours! Thinking back, how did all of this start? My friend and I were going through blog posts on top 30 must try cafes. How did they collect this? Surely networking and linking their sites or social media came into play.

It started off when my buddy talked about how his time in Melbourne is limited and he has a lot of cafes to check out. His friends had recommended a few cafes and we checked some of the famous ones online. One of the famous eatery blogs was The Urban List. Another friend of mine had linked me to the 30 Breakfasts You Should Have Eaten If You Live in Melbourne list on that website.

The Urban List

The Urban List

Most of the recommendations were listed on the website. That definitely increases the reliability as well as the interest of that cafe. The more the viewers or mentions the more worthy for us to experience it. By chance we saw another famous cafe as we walk along the streets, we would stop and check it out. Networking comes into play here because without blogs or word of mouth, we definitely would not know which cafe is the best to visit with such limited time. Social media is also a powerful way of networking as they can link you to blogs or reviews and people telling you about the cafe they have been.

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