To the left is my first draft. I wanted to think about having good content space, as well as some style on the design. The entire design was done on photoshop, and is being used to try out ideas and try and get something that will help me along the line. The banner as you can see is rather stale at the moment however I hope it will do for the time being!





















To the right is the second draft, I came up with the idea to make a fansite on a popular video game. Perhaps a weakness of this draft is that the main character is taking up content, however I wanted to play with the idea of something jumping out of its conventional box and to make it look a bit more appealing. In addition, the banner is still a bit bland, although I hope fans of the game would recognize where the image originates.

The dilemma of Copyright law, piracy and the Internet.

The dilemma of Copyright law, piracy and the Internet.

I came across a very good documentary called Steal This Film, which includes interviews with the MPAA, the Swedish folk who the controversial Pirate Bay.

The mainstream media industry has a new war on its hands and the World Wide Web is its enemy. For decades Hollywood and the music industry has enjoyed its undisputed position as the king of entertainment in the western world. There seems to be a force threatening its throne. With the emergence of new technology, it is undisputable that the laws protecting the media conglomerates are becoming increasingly vague and even harder to enforce. How can a company in LA file a lawsuit against a 14 year old kid in Holland for example? Unfortunately these industries are failing to adapt to this new era and are aggressively reacting the free distribution of its media products. We’ve seen musicians exploring the potential in this new market can be successful. Radiohead distributed their album In Rainbows digitally for free and welcomed donations from their fans. Nonetheless, the industry seems inept and has a model that is stuck in the past.

We’ve seen the problems with remixing content with powerful tools; any individual can acquire some of an artist’s music and alter it in any desired direction the mixer wants to. But isn’t this how culture has always worked? Taking ideas and different elements of cultures before and developing it with your own? I strongly believe that a society with free distribution of culture is a better one than one that isolates its cultures on the grounds of ‘intellectual property’ I would also agree with the point made about the same industry doing the same thing. The video link below shows us how the same 6 second music beat invented by The Winstons had been reused again and again for years and had became the base of the genre! In fact it raises the argument that some of these music labels had became successful on the back of flimsy copyright laws and yet wants to punish the new generation using new laws that would have prevented it from doing the exact same thing they had done 20 years ago!



The fact is, the music and film industry is losing itself millions dollars in advertising against piracy and criminalizing its own consumers with ridiculous witch hunts which is quite frankly like looking for a needle in a haystack. One of the interviewees in the Steal This Film documentary uses the great analogy of “It is as if though they decided to intimidate the village they would just chop off the head of the few villagers, mount those heads on pikes as a warning to everyone else”

If corporate media wants to survive the 21^st century with the privileges it had in the 20^th, it better stop resisting new technologies and instead recognize the power of consumer created content.

Blog Entry Four – online viral campaign project!

I’ve decided to write up my newest entry on our Bring Back Ronald McDonald campaign task we were set in our Digital Media workshop. To start with, I will admit there were a lot of things we could have done to improve it and get widespread attention, technically the quality of the sound wasn’t clear and we could have spent more time getting more interviews. That said, it was funny and I think with more attention and online marketing could be somewhat successful given the topic is humorous and brings back feelings of nostalgia. If you browse many current Facebook groups this is a common trend, for example there has been “Join this group if you remember Keenan and Kel” It was this trend that brought our group on to the idea.

Internet viral in web 2.0 has become something of phenomena. Often the smallest ideas or simple homemade videos, made by an individual either unintentionally or intentionally can get global attention and can even get recognition in mainstream news. Examples of this is Rick Rolling, or the well known Chuck Norris jokes that started with a small in joke between a tight knit community that had snowballed all over the World Wide Web. As the power of the Internet grows, we’ll be seeing more of how it influences us on the outside world. Chuck Norris is probably more famous now than he ever was when he made his films, it is evident Internet marketing will become an integral part of corporate strategy if it wants to compete.

One of the strengths of our video I believe is that I believe it is straight to the point and the message gets across quite clearly. I also felt it was funny and ironic which may help stick in people’s minds because more often than not we associate protests and campaigns against McDonalds with the damage it causes to the environment, its unhealthy food products and that economies of scale swamp local produced restaurants. I think on the whole, if the quality of the video was better and we spent more time trying to distribute the video through YouTube and Facebook, something could materialize and perhaps even some pressure could be heaped on to McDonalds to ditch the ”I’m lovin’ it.” Slogan it now has.

If you haven’t watched my group’s campaign you can watch it here!



Group members were:

Daniel Norris – myself
Jess Osborne
Matt Nash
Tanya Webber