Machinima interventions: innovative approaches to immersive virtual world curriculum integration

The educational value of Immersive Virtual Worlds (IVWs) seems to be in their social immersive qualities and as an accessible simulation technology. In contrast to these synchronous applications this paper discusses the use of educational machinima developed in IVW virtual film sets. It also introduces the concept of media intervention, proposing that digital media works best when simply developed for deployment within a blended curriculum to inform learning activity, and where the media are specifically designed to set challenges, seed ideas, or illustrate problems. Machinima, digital films created in IVWs, or digital games offer a rich mechanism for delivering such interventions. Scenes are storyboarded, constructed, shot and edited using techniques similar to professional film production, drawing upon a cast of virtual world avatars controlled through a human–computer interface, rather than showing real‐life actors. The approach enables academics or students to make films using screen capture software and desktop editing tools. In student‐generated production models the learning value may be found in the production process itself. This paper discusses six case studies and several themes from research on ideas for educational machinima including: access to production; creativity in teaching and learning; media intervention methodology; production models; reusability; visualisation and simulation

Glowing Like Phosphorus: Dorothea Tanning and the Sedona Western

abstract: In the mid-1940s, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst left the urbane, avant-garde circles of Manhattan to build a house and studio in the then remote Southwestern outpost of Sedona, Arizona. Many have written of Ernst’s fascination with indigenous artefacts but there was another pop cultural format that emerged concurrently with their time in Sedona: the genre of the Hollywood Western. Indeed, films like John Wayne’s Angel and the Badman (1947) and Johnny Guitar (1954) starring Joan Crawford were filmed in the immediate vicinity, amidst the iconic red rock landscape. Tanning’s topographical mapping of the desert, as found in paintings such as Self-Portrait (1944), Evening in Sedona (1976), and novella Chasm: A Weekend (2004), feature some of those same scenic locations used as the backdrops in the Sedona Western. Comparisons between the self-presentation of Tanning and the actor Gail Russell are striking especially when one considers Tanning’s own performance in Hans Richter’s film 8 x 8 (1957). Moreover, the feminine, “phosphorus” glow, which Tanning recurrently uses in her painting and writing to describe the appearance of her female characters, matches the typical costuming of the lead women in Westerns, for example Russell’s Penny and Crawford’s Vienna. This article explores the complex role the Sedona Western played in the surrealist art and literature made during Ernst and Tanning’s Sedona period and beyond, particularly in terms of gender politics. In order to rethink this moment of “Western surrealism,” I offer a Tanning-centric perspective through methodological use of Mieke Bal’s feminist “autotopography.

Evaluation of yasmine’s adventures: exploring the socio-cultural potential of location aware multimedia stories

This paper describes Yasmine’s Adventures, a location aware multi‐ media story designed as a location based service for a museum. Yasmine’s Adventures follows a young local girl (Yasmine) through a series of short animated adventures, tailored specifically to engage visitors in exploring the rela‐ tively neglected streets of the area in which the museum is situated. Yasmine’s perceptions of the landmarks, identified by community members themselves, reflect the real concerns of the community. Results from the evaluation of the user’s experience suggest location connection and perception changes when loca‐ tive media narratives include learning, understanding and discovery elements.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

THE SEEN AS OBSCENE: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN ROBERT ALTMAN’S FILM ‘SHORT CUTS’

This study aims at analyzing Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts (1993), the equivocal and disputed adaptation of nine short stories and a narrative poem by American author Raymond Carver. The investigation, however, centers specifically on Altman’s revisitation of Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” (1981). The study conducted here examines negative responses to the intermedial transposition of the narrative concerning violence against women. Grounds are provided to support the contention that the gender issues are due to the different styles of both Carver and Altman, the change in the mode of engagement (cf. HUTCHEON, 2006, p. 22-27) on the part of the audience and a certain “anti-corporeality” (STAM, 2005) reaction to graphic scenes involving gender-based violence. In order to substantiate such concepts, it is argued that although Short Cuts changes portions of the adapted text, it re-accentuates its psychological crises and gender antagonisms by means of a cinematic construction of visually shocking images and shifting perspectives

Holocaust Film before the Holocaust: DEFA, Antifascism and the Camps

The period prior to the 1970s has frequently been portrayed internationally as one of public disavowal of the Jewish catastrophe politically and cinematically and as one in which there was a dearth of filmic representations of the Holocaust. In addition to the Hollywood productions The Diary of Anne Frank (1960), Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965), one often spoke of just a few East and West European films emerging within a political and cultural landscape that was viewed by many as unable or unwilling to address the subject. This article takes issue with these assumptions by focusing on feature films made by DEFA between 1946 and 1963 in East Berlin’s Soviet Zone and in East Germany which had as their subject matter the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich.Très peu de films représentant l’Holocauste ont été produits avant les années 1970. Cette période a souvent été considérée, sur le plan international, comme une période de désaveu, tant politique que cinématographique, de la catastrophe ayant frappé les Juifs. Outre les productions hollywoodiennes The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961) et The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965), on a souvent fait remarquer que peu de films est- ou ouest-européens ont émergé de ce paysage politique et culturel, ce qui a été perçu par plusieurs comme une incapacité ou une réticence à traiter du sujet. Le présent article fait de cette présomption son principal enjeu en s’intéressant à des films tournés par la DEFA entre 1946 et 1963, dans la zone soviétique de Berlin-Est et en Allemagne de l’Est, et qui ont pour objet la persécution des Juifs sous le Troisième Reich

The Time and Space of Greek-Cypriot Cinema: A Deleuzian Reading

This study traces the emergence of Greek-Cypriot Cinema in Cyprus since 1974, arguing that it is the product of a historical moment. 1974 marks a watershed in the island’s protracted political conflict which culminated in ethnic violence, a coup and war. Whilst the war has been the subject of wide ranging scholarly research its impact in forging a distinctive national cinema remains unexamined. This thesis attempts to re-address this absence. My approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on historiographical studies as well as Film Studies, Cultural Theory and Film Philosophy. Primary research includes extensive dialogues with filmmakers. All of the films examined deal explicitly with facets of space, time and memory in connection to the experiences of the war. In view of these prevalent themes the thesis makes the case for reading Greek-Cypriot Cinema through the cinema work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whilst holding the films’ cultural and national contexts in view. It proposes that Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2:The Time-Image (1985) explore the interconnection between real spaces outside of cinema and the creative spaces inside, through the categories of time and space. Centring on the conceptual shift in these volumes from a cinema of movement to a cinema of time and memory I argue that Deleuze’s paradigm offers a conceptual engagement with the distinctiveness and complexities of Greek-Cypriot Cinema; as it negotiates the real and abstract time and spaces which are imagined, reflected and visualised on the screen. Part one conceptualises Greek-Cypriot Cinema within existing studies of cinema and nation, examining Deleuze’s descriptions of modern and political cinema. Part two examines time and recollection-images in the films of Georgiou, Florides and Nicolaides, Tofarides and Koukoumas. Part three scrutinises how the changes in the political landscape after 2003 are reflected in films which imagine a new dynamic between time and spaces, creating new cinematic images in works by Farmakas, Stylianou and Danezi-Knutsen