Wednesday 23 November 2016

Most students can’t tell the difference between sponsored content and real news

Study underscores the need for more media literacy in schools

by


Most students can’t tell the difference between real news articles and sponsored content, according to a study from Stanford University, raising concerns over how young people consume online media. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the study is the largest to date on how young people evaluate online media, involving 7,804 students from middle school to college. It will be published on Tuesday.

According to the study, 82 percent of students could not distinguish between a sponsored post and an actual news article on the same website. Nearly 70 percent of middle schoolers thought they had no reason to distrust a sponsored finance article written by the CEO of a bank, and many students evaluate the trustworthiness of tweets based on their level of detail and the size of attached photos, according to the Journal.

The US presidential election has sparked a debate over how Facebook and other web companies treat fake news articles, which some have blamed for spreading misinformation ahead of the vote. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company is working on systems to limit the spread of false information, and Google will ban fake news sites from its lucrative ad network.

But the Stanford study suggests that students still struggle to evaluate the credibility of online sources, making it difficult to sift through more subtle forms of misinformation such as advertising and sponsored posts. Schools have begun offering more media literacy courses, the Journal reports, but they also have fewer librarians to help teach basic research skills. Stanford professor and lead author Sam Wineburg tells the Journal that students should learn to cross-check the legitimacy of websites using other sources and to not always equate a site’s high Google search rankings with accuracy.

Friday 11 November 2016

Westworld is a cautionary tale about photorealism and video game murder

A theme park without consequences isn’t so farfetched
by Nick Statt@nickstatt Nov 3, 2016 via The Verge


But it seems Sizemore is on the losing side of this argument. Why stand in the way of technological progress when it could mean truly sentient androids, lacking basic human rights, and controllable by code that allows humans to play god?
Like many of Westworld’s early themes and motifs, this debate has its parallel in the video game industry. Sizemore’s argument against realism is increasingly unpopular in gaming circles, as the steady march toward graphical fidelity and artificial intelligence lets us interact with lifelike virtual representations of people - mostly in violent ways. Sizemore wonders whether the park is trying too hard to offer a perfect simulation of reality, instead of an escape from it. Similarly, game critics and other industry figures are wondering whether we truly need to feel like we’re hurting or killing real people in games - and if so, why.

In Westworld, guests are invited to indulge in violent and sexual fantasies, using the regressive frontier backdrop to explore their wildest, darkest desires. William, a character introduced in episode two, chooses to see the park and its robots as an opportunity to show his moral fibre. Others, like William’s companion Logan and the mythic Man in Black, see Westworld as an invitation to be vile and malicious. Those men exercise the freedom of a world without consequences to test the limits of depravity.

That’s true in games, too. If we know something is fake — just a game, so to speak - we can act out without feeling any of the shame or guilt we’d typically associate with morally reprehensible activities. It’s why we can go on murdering sprees in careful re-creations of American cities in Grand Theft Auto without feeling like something is wrong with us. Those people on the screen are just pixels. They’re poor simulations of the real thing, guided by intricate physics systems and complex code, but lacking the realism required to provoke empathy. And because it’s an open world with no consequences, our actions don’t necessarily reflect our capacity for violence - or our desire for it.

That situation may be temporary. As games continue to approach photorealism, and as higher-quality virtual reality and sophisticated artificial intelligence become more common, the debate will only get murkier. The “It’s just a game!” defence won’t hold as much water when digital characters look and feel so lifelike that it’s impossible to tell them from the real thing, just as it’s impossible to know who on Westworld may secretly be an android. In a VR world, when you actually pull a trigger or swing a weapon, the feeling of harming real, human victims may only intensify.
HBO

Arguing against these advancements feels like an uphill battle
HBO
Rarely do games try to definitively stand for something


In the debut episode of HBO’s Westworld, narrative director Lee Sizemore makes a case that the futuristic theme park’s team should stop working toward increasingly lifelike androids. “Does anyone truly want that?” he asks. “Do you really want to think that your husband is fucking that beautiful girl? Or that you really just shot someone? This place works because the guests know the hosts aren’t real.”
Games let us act without consequences

Violence and photorealism are hallmarks of the industry. And still, for any given half-dozen forgettable shooter titles, there’s one rare gem that uses technical advancements to craft a real masterpiece. But it’s still worth asking what viewers, consumers, and players prefer. How many people actually want an 8K television in their home, or are willing to pay $25 to see a film in 120 fps? On the more extreme ends of the spectrum, who would actually buy a VR serial-killer simulator, or a game with photorealistic torture, or one featuring an interactive version of the kind of sexual violence highbrow television like Game of Thrones is currently peddling?

As far as we can tell, there is no ceiling on a game’s graphical fidelity. Years from now, we will undoubtedly have experiences, both on TV screens and likely in VR, that may look and feel no different from the real world. Sophisticated AI could ensure that, like Westworld’s bots, these characters speak, react, and act out scenarios just as humans would, down to the tiniest details.

“This place works because the guests know the hosts aren’t real,” Sizemore says. But what happens to us morally when we don’t know that? It’s one of Westworld’s more profound questions, and co-creator Jonathan Nolan has revealed in the past that his show has no intentions of answering it, at least not in full. “I don’t think the show is really teaching anything,” Nolan said at a press roundtable prior to the premiere. Instead, he and fellow showrunner Lisa Joy want to shed light on issues in gaming and provoke their audience as much as possible.
In that, we have yet another game industry parallel. Rarely do video games try to definitively stand for something, to convey a message that players are too vile, violent, or capable of evil. Yet in games, shallow violence is how we most often interact with our virtual counterparts, whether they’re humans across the country, or AI guided by code. It’s the medium’s single biggest source of contradiction. Unlike Westworld, violent games rarely, if ever, help us “live without limits” or “discover who we really are.” They mostly just redefine what can be considered fun - shooting people in the face, hitting pedestrians with cars - and how we spend our time.

Perhaps as games look and feel more real, and their inhabitants become more lifelike, technology can expand the horizons of what games can communicate and convey. There will always be murder simulators, war games, and the zombie apocalypse. But perhaps violence won’t entirely define games as an art form in the future.

Because if Westworld succeeds at anything right now, it’s as a cautionary tale. “How different are we really from these theme-park guests?” it asks. Right now, not very much at all.


Thursday 27 October 2016

Why The Golden Ratio Is Better Than The Rule Of Thirds

by Jon Sparkman via PetaPixel

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A long time ago I was a young art student, being told about the “Rule Of Thirds.” I was told it’s one of the most important fundamentals of art and photography, as it helps you get the right composition in your images.

Overlay a tic-tac-toe/noughts and crosses grid over your image and crop or move your picture around so that the “points of interest” lie on the lines or line intersections. Sounds simple enough. It has been the basis of countless millions of images throughout the centuries. But is it perfect? No! Is there a better, more badass brother to the grid? Yes! Enter the Golden Ratio.

Just to slow things down a bit, here’s what the Rule Of Thirds (I’ll call it the ROT grid from now on) looks like on a plain black background. Chances are you’re familiar with it, you’ve seen it pop up on the viewfinder of your camera or as an overlay in Photoshop or Lightroom. The grid is great for making sure your horizons are straight, for making sure there are subjects spaced out evenly throughout the frame and generally giving a bit of calm and order to the scene.

The grid is great for making sure your horizons are straight, for making sure there are subjects spaced out evenly throughout the frame and generally giving a bit of calm and order to the scene. 
Here’s its superior, wiser, and elusive brother: the Golden Ratio, also sometimes called the Fibonacci Spiral. It is the result of when you do some complex maths on a rectangle to the tune of: a/b = (a+b)/a = 1.61803398875. There's no need to memorize this, you can find the overlays everywhere on the Internet to download and paste over your images, as well as being built in (but very well hidden) in Lightroom.

To access this spiral, press R to get your cropping function open, then cycle through the available overlays with O until you find the spiral. Turning it around is done by pressing Shift + O. There are eight variations to it.

Looks kind of fun, a tight coil ending up off centre and providing a great host of lines to align your picture up to.Looks kind of fun, a tight coil ending up off centre and providing a great host of lines to align your picture up to.

If I put the two overlays on top of each other, you can see how similarly they intersect. The tight spiral of the blue ratio almost marries up with the lower right intersection of the red overlay. There is a reason why the golden ratio gets oft pushed away because it’s murder to have all its eight variations displayed on a screen at once.

The lower right intersection of the red lines is pretty close to the tight curl of the spiral.The lower right intersection of the red lines is pretty close to the tight curl of the spiral.

So if the golden ratio is more hassle than the ROT grid, why should I care about it? It all comes down to the long sweeping arc of the spiral. Putting your subjects along a curved line rather than straight grid lines draws the viewers eyes around the picture, forcing it to go closer to the tight coil of the spiral where you’ve placed your point of interest. It’s like a giant subliminal road sign pointing the eyes towards where you want them to go.

Here's the reason they don't put the spiral as an overlay on your camera. The spiral in just four of its eight possible orientations.Here’s the reason they don’t put the spiral as an overlay on your camera. The spiral in just four of its eight possible orientations.

I hope I haven’t lost you yet. Here are a few real-world examples of the Golden Ratio in practice on a few of my images, one without an overlay and one with. Hopefully, you can see how many times the images follow the sweeping curves and conclude with the focal point of the image in the tight coil.

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The line follows the body shape of the man on the bed and finishes at the womans stare.The line follows the body shape of the man on the bed and finishes at the woman’s stare.

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This image focuses on the child, dominating the image in the foreground, larger than the adult mother.This image focuses on the child, dominating the image in the foreground, larger than the adult mother.

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This time the spiral passes through background objects like the chair and tripod, around the lighting and on to the crook of the leg of the photographer on the floor.This time the spiral passes through background objects like the chair and tripod, around the lighting and on to the crook of the leg of the photographer on the floor.

thirds_11

The focus is pulled towards the car's open door, making the viewer ask the question "why?"The focus is pulled towards the car’s open door, making the viewer ask the question “why?”

There are a whole host of different ways you can use the Golden Ratio—from portraits to landscapes… even sports and street photography. Start looking out for the Golden Section when editing your pictures in your favourite cropping post-production program and see how it can take your pictures from “yeah” to “oh yeah!”

I have to admit, once I discovered my love for the Ratio, I started flicking back through the past few years of shoots to re-crop images in the Ratio. In my opinion, these newly-cropped pictures feel much more dynamic and interesting, and forcibly lead the eye around the pictures.

As always, it’s entirely up to you to take my advice, but I just want to be able to show that there’s more to the world of art than a criss-cross of lines. Let's just call the Golden Ratio “The Rule Of Thirds, Plus Some More” (TROTPSM for short).


About the author: Jon Sparkman is a Cheltenham, UK-based fine art photographer. He centres his work on conveying a message through his photography. You can find his work at www.sparkman.photography and follow him on Instagram and Twitter. This post was also published here.

Thursday 11 February 2016

21 Tricks You Don't Notice In Great Movies (Your Brain Does)


By  
We know that filmmaking is more than just a bunch of actors reading a script while some dude points a camera and records it all. There's a lot of careful direction and editing and cinematography going on that is required to take your movie up another level from made-for-TV-but-specifically-made-for-SyFy. But even further than that, there are myriad subtle touches a filmmaker has to give to their movie to make it truly amazing -- some that even go as far as tricking you into feeling a certain way while you're watching a particular scene. We're talking about things like ...


by milito

by milito

by milito
 

Friday 15 January 2016

The Problem with Trailers



Why do all trailers feel the same? How do great trailers stand out? Let's look at the structure of trailers over time and see how they've grown, and why some are practically identical.


Twitter:
https://twitter.com/swagthug4lyfe

Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/nowyouseeit

Trailers in Order of Appearance:
In A World (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZHBj...
The Avengers (2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOrNd...
Brooklyn (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15syD...
The Wolf of Wallstreet (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iszwu...
Scrooge (1951) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97PwR...
Psycho (1960) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps8H3...
Die Hard (1988) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TQ-p...
Sixteen Candles (1984) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGLtB...
Comedian (2002) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVDzu...
When Harry Met Sally (1989) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DgD...
The Martian (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej3io...
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGbxm...
World War Z (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcwTx...
Spectre (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GqCl...
John Carter (2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlvYK...
American Sniper (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MItGo...
Superman vs. Batman (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yViIi...
Furious 7 (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yISKe...
Car Commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfZ7o...
Chicken Car Commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69os9...