22-28 October 2012

                It’s getting tiring to say we worked on Peano Advertising again this week.  But we did; the project is now done.

                It would be fitting, in a sense, to talk about my thoughts on the project.  I already did that, though (in brief: it was a mess, but still relatively fun/educational).  Therefore I’ll just mention that we finished the week by observing others’ projects.  There was a Dr. Pepper ad, a generic environmental ad, a Coca-Cola ad, a chicken restaurant ad, a card game ad, a band ad, a Chevrolet Corvette ad and our own BMW motorcycles ad.  None of the groups seemed to have a focused theme to their campaigns, besides perhaps a slogan. Most showed a good use of Photoshop and audio-editing software; the best one, in my opinion, was the Dr. Pepper image with penguins drinking Dr. Pepper.

                Oh, and we have an exam coming up next week.  I don’t particularly understand what it’s going to be about.  Interesting….

15-21 October 2012

                This was the penultimate week of the Peano Advertising project.  We studied compression and its algorithms, but most of the time was spent on getting together our “portfolios”.   The three pieces involved are the digital “interview”, the audio file, and the visual portion; this week, our group began work on the audio file.  Due to the whims of work distribution, this was done by my partners; I finished up my images and worked some on the digital interview.

                We also discussed the morality of digital “piracy”.  I definitely got the impression, from our debate with assigned sides, that most people agreed it was wrong- at least, in the general case.  Yes, sometimes one can’t get music or a movie legally, and then draconian laws are pointless; but the amount of people that really thought art as we know it could have evolved entirely in the public domain was encouragingly small.  All of this is not to say I don’t think copyright is broken, but maybe the fact that most of the class disagreed with digital piracy meant most don’t practice it.

                But I still doubt it.

8-14 October 2012

                This week, we continued the advertising project.  The project (entitled “Peano Advertising Wants You”) involves three portions: a digital “interview”, or essay, a visual ad and an audio ad.  The blog for last week already describes some of my misgivings about the project, so I won’t repeat them.  Instead I’ll say that, in the end, Photoshop is fun, and the project as a whole appears quite creative.

                Besides working on the project, we studied copyright this week.  It seems copyright, like heliocentrism, is going to be a topic that pops up in various classes this year.   Certainly, though, the  perspective of a Computer Science teacher on copyright is going to be different from a Fine Arts teacher!  Personally, my view on copyright is that it should be there, but significantly weaker (or at least shorter-term); perhaps then there would be less need for semi-copyright licenses like Creative Commons.  At the very least, it needs to be fair- say, copyright can’t go to anyone but the creator.

                We also looked at audio quality.  I have to say, a 250 Hz sampling rate sounds much better than I expected.  It sounds nothing like the original music, but that can be for the best.   Anyhow, there’s certainly quality lost when you compress music, but there’s a definite boundary between “bad quality” and “indecipherable quality”.

1-7 October 2012

                Last week, we finally got our real second project- a Photoshop+MP3 advertisement campaign.  It promises to be… interesting.  In the Chinese sense.

                The big problem that I see is that we are studying the impact of digital manipulation of images and sound on society- through, for example, the study of piracy or remixing.  But the project requires not so much knowledge of Photoshop’s impact on society, but rather knowledge of how to use Photoshop, and likewise for any audio editing program we wind up using.

                Much of what we studied in class has been directly useful.  For example, we looked at the difference between vector and raster images, or the difference between file formats.  Both are significant things that deserve to be learned, and both help with the fake ad campaign.  It’s just frustrating that, even more than in SciTech, we seem to have been thrown a problem and not all of the tools necessary to solve it.

                Though unlike that class, at least this is just one of several projects.