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(03/13/18 9:21pm)
by Jeremy Rogers
For many planning to participate in tomorrow’s protest honoring the lives of the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, it will be a demonstration of political outrage, but for others gun violence is more personal. We got to sit down with two important women who are organizing the demonstration and hear about their reasons for speaking out.
Darla Thomas, the Alpha Chi Omega sorority sister who organized the event, has personal experience with mental illness in her family. Thomas grew up with an older brother who she said would be considered mentally ill. While her brother does not have a history of gun violence, Darla attributes this to the absence of guns in her family’s house.
Darla is working with Ball State freshman Lexi Angel who graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High last year. In a public Facebook post on February 15, Lexi shared,
“I'm at a loss of words. The fear and defeat I felt today while waiting to hear back from the teachers who changed my life and the students that will remain my friends forever was the most traumatic experience. This will stay in my heart forever. To think the first man I saw every morning and always put the biggest smile on my face, Coach Feis, shielded students today is mind boggling. He was has always been a hero to me. My heart is just shattered”
When we talked with her, she shared her experience learning about the attack on her school.
(03/13/18 9:21pm)
For many planning to participate in tomorrow’s protest honoring the lives of the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, it will be a demonstration of political outrage, but for others gun violence is more personal. We got to sit down with two important women who are organizing the demonstration and hear about their reasons for speaking out.
(02/19/18 11:56pm)
Ball State students are performing one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, Pericles: Prince of Tyre, in Strother Studio Theatre. Under the direction of Ball State theatre professor Karen Kessler, dozens of students have worked to put on an impressive production. The show stars Jacob Barnes, an acting major in his senior year, playing the eponymous ancient prince.
(02/19/18 3:49pm)
by Jeremy Rogers
Ball State students are performing one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, Pericles: Prince of Tyre, in Strother Studio Theatre. Under the direction of Ball State theatre professor Karen Kessler, dozens of students have worked to put on an impressive production. The show stars Jacob Barnes, an acting major in his senior year, playing the eponymous ancient prince.
(01/15/18 6:36am)
(12/29/17 11:00pm)
Every year produces a relentless heaping of blockbuster films that sell fantastically, but how many of them are actually good is another question entirely. Though the major circuit may have been a little bit short on masterpieces this year, it was by no means empty. We got another great Pixar movie, a beautiful shoutout to The Room, and the best M. Night Shyamalan film in a long time. We also caught a whole host of independent films at Heartland Film Festival this year, some of which were made in our own backyard. So as it turns out, the year of The Disaster Artist wasn’t such a disaster after all.
(12/19/17 9:42pm)
“Super Hard PCness” is a refreshing callback 18 years in the making. This episode is packed full of allusions and hints all relating back to South Park’s first movie South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. The plots are fairly similar, with a lot of similar plot beats happening in both the movie and the episode.
(12/18/17 11:00am)
by Jeremy Rogers
“Super Hard PCness” is a refreshing callback 18 years in the making. This episode is packed full of allusions and hints all relating back to South Park’s first movie South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. The plots are fairly similar, with a lot of similar plot beats happening in both the movie and the episode.
In the 1999 feature-length film, Kyle Broflovski’s mom blames all of Canada for the way a crass movie based on their most popular television show affects her oldest son. Terrance and Phillip, the show that gets a feature length adaption, is where Canada’s most famous comedians fart on people for laughs. Mrs. Broflovski organizes a coalition of concerned mothers, Mothers Against Canada, to combat the vulgarity, and they even reach the ear of President Bill Clinton. When the Canadians refuse to cooperate with the president’s plea to give up on Terrance and Phillip, the two countries go to war. In the end, Mrs. Broflovski learns that she shouldn’t blame other countries and their cultural exports for her own failings as a parent.
This time around in 2017, it’s not angry mothers out to censor entertainment but millennials. After not finding the new Terrance and Phillip Netflix show as funny as Heidi, Cartman and the rest of his friends, Kyle gives himself a bit of a makeover. He takes off his Terrance and Phillip shirt to put on a new one under his coat. He also takes off his hat to show that his hair is still styled from when he gelled and combed it to impress Heidi. Now Kyle takes a pair of clippers to his hair, literally shedding the part of him that was trying to impress Cartman’s girlfriend. Kyle then organizes a group of young people to stop Terrance and Philip’s new Netflix show. Millennials Against Canada storms the set of the show to shut it down. But the reason why is where “Super Hard PCness” turns away from the movie.
Instead of promoting a message about not using entertainment (Terrance and Philip acting as a loose allegory for South Park) as a scapegoat to blame misbehavior on, this episode takes a more critical eye to the role of the show in promoting undesirable behavior. What prompts Kyle to reject this show is seeing how a girl he had a crush on now is practically another Cartman, laughing right along with him as minorities are repeatedly farted on by a pair of tired comedians telling the same jokes into their old age.
Even though a more critical eye is turned toward the show’s influence on people, South Park still sticks to its ideals. Kyle takes his concerns to the new vice principal of the school, Strong Woman. After telling Vice Principal Woman about his concerns, she starts to talk to Kyle about the dangers of making scapegoats out of cartoons to cover for personal failings.
Complicating matters at the school are PC Principal’s feelings for his subordinate. He tries to suppress his feelings, because having feelings for someone who is your subordinate in a professional standing is something PC culture deems as being totally inappropriate. This sets up an interesting dynamic that poises South Park for some great commentary on the wave of recent high profile sexual assault cases happening in the news.
All in all, this is a solid episode that helps to show that the answers to some of life’s hard problems can change as time goes by. The differences from the film’s sequence of events highlight changes in both society and changes in South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Are they, like Kyle, trying to give their show an internal makeover? Or, like PC Principal, do they find themselves drawn to that which society deems inappropriate?
(12/10/17 11:02pm)
by Jeremy Rogers
Former Secretary of Labor during the 1990s, Robert Reich, has always been a left-wing populist. After feeling like he was not getting his goals accomplished while serving with the rest of President Clinton’s cabinet, Reich stepped down as Labor secretary to spend time outside of political life. Since then he has authored several books, his most recent sharing its title, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, with his new Netflix documentary. Reich’s name came into some prominence during the build-up to the 2016 presidential elections, where he quickly threw his support behind Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders. Since his latest book was released in mid-2015, Reich can use this new Netflix documentary as an opportunity to let hindsight illuminate key parts of his message. Is he successful? Can this documentary save capitalism?
Does this really need a story?
Saving Capitalism, like many documentaries, does not have a traditional narrative plot per se. Instead Reich begins by talking about his childhood and about how poorly the middle class is doing in 2017. The topics discussed in the documentary roughly coincide with accounts from Reich’s life that are germane to the other topics being discussed. Even though the anecdotes from the former labor secretary’s past are told in chronological order, there seems to be little in the way of cause and effect tying each story together. We start with Reich’s first job as an intern, go through his college life, his time as Labor secretary and his time since as a university professor and as an advocate for liberal economic policy.
Despite the abundance of Reich’s life story in the documentary, it is not a biopic. There are many shots of Reich giving speeches to crowds and Reich appearing on television. Some scenes are of Reich meeting with politicians and lobbyists to discuss the economy. The net effect is that too much of the documentary is focused on Reich and not enough on what he has to say about saving capitalism.
Repetition, repetition, repetition
Throughout the film, Reich changes settings a lot in the course of talking to so many groups of people. Because of this, it always feels like the same basic talking points about the economy are repeated in different ways more often than should be necessary for a 70-minute documentary. There are many great points that are touched on in the documentary that could have been expanded on, but the editing takes up run time repeating basic stances anyone familiar with Reich’s work should already be familiar with.
Over the years, Reich has had a lot to say about the distribution of wealth and how the economy is organized. He’s already written 14 books on the matter, so it’s confusing why the finer points of his arguments weren’t dived into more. The strongest points of the documentary were when the exact figures were brought out to make specific points. More sections discussing exact dollar figures would have helped make Reich’s case.
Better on the page
Documentaries are a visual medium. That means that there has to be something stimulating for the eye to look at while information is being delivered to the viewer. Saving Capitalism is not a great adaptation because it sacrifices too much of the source material to make segments that appeal to the eye.
This is confusing, because the book this documentary is based on does not follow the same formula. There is so much more depth and cohesion of theme in the book which makes the state of the adaptation surprising. Perhaps Reich was advised to dumb down his content to better appeal to the young Netflix crowd. A documentary titled Saving Capitalism does not seem like the kind of thing Joe Average Netflix user would turn on after binging Stranger Things 2. It’s presented as a more in-depth look at how to save the economic system of the United States. Reich should have literally taken a page from his own book and made this documentary focused and in-depth instead of being an entry point into his ideology.
For a better example of how to make an effectively formatted book-based, left-wing documentary for Netflix, see Noam Chomsky’s Requiem for the American Dream. The format is more book-like, setting up what feel like book chapters and following through with each chapter’s topic until it’s completely finished. If Saving Capitalism had emulated that formula, the message would have felt less disjointed.
Featured image from Saving Capitalism
(12/05/17 8:00am)
by Jeremy Rogers
Cardinal Metrics is hosting a social mixer this evening in the hopes that students from all walks of life and all majors will come to learn about how they can get involved with using emerging technology.
The event will be held in the Holden Strategic Communications Center in the Arts and Journalism building from 7:00 – 8:30 pm. Participants will be able to explore the emergent technology of eye-tracking through an iSpy game. Afterwards, students will get to visualize their results and make an in-depth evaluation of how they did.
Eye tracking technology uses a series of sensors that find a viewer's eyes and measures changes in pupil dilation, direction, and blink frequency among other factors to see where on a screen the viewer looks and for how long. Stringing together data points, designers then have access to data about what elements of design attract attention and which elements need to be highlighted more.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="388"] Image from Flickr[/caption]
Eye tracking is used by many web designers to maximize the effectiveness of their page layouts. Applications of this can range from a restaurant optimizing its menu design so customers' eyes are drawn to the best food to news outlets gauging how effective their advertisements are placed on a given page. New uses for the technology are being conceived every day. Eye tracking is being used to help determine the mental work load of doing certain activities and to evaluate the performance and expertise of doctors.
Eye tracking is just the beginning of learning about what Cardinal Metrics does. Cardinal Metrics is a student-run media organization that analyses data to find solutions for a number of varied clients. In addition to gaining real world experience by working with clients, members of the group are also able to receive professional certifications that can make them more attractive to employers after graduation.
The end of the semester is quickly arriving, so there's no better time to learn about Cardinal Metrics and what they do for Ball State's student media groups.
Sources: Look Tracker, Eye Tracker
Images: Facebook, Flickr
(12/05/17 1:00pm)
Cardinal Metrics is hosting a social mixer this evening in the hopes that students from all walks of life and all majors will come to learn about how they can get involved with using emerging technology.
(12/02/17 11:00pm)
“Moss Piglets” is the latest installment of South Park’s 21st season. Last week’s “Doubling Down” saw the show bring out one of its smartest episodes in years, communicating a clear message that is not often heard in modern political discourse. Naturally, fans were eager to see if last week’s episode was a sign of a new trend of brilliance or if it was a fluke.
(12/01/17 7:47pm)
by Jeremy Rogers
“Moss Piglets” is the latest installment of South Park’s 21st season. Last week’s “Doubling Down” saw the show bring out one of its smartest episodes in years, communicating a clear message that is not often heard in modern political discourse. Naturally, fans were eager to see if last week’s episode was a sign of a new trend of brilliance or if it was a fluke.
Less of a fluke and more of a sea bear. Sea creature puns aside, this episode was not the second coming that fans were hoping for. The special-ed science fair is coming up soon, and Nathan and Mimsy are trying to win so they can use their success to score some girls. All the while Cartman’s girlfriend Heidi is angry people are trying to hold her to her promise to judge the science fair on a Saturday. Heidi has changed drastically since fully embracing Cartman; she’s become fat, more belligerent, and much more outspoken about whatever displeases her.
Nathan and Mimsy’s baking soda and vinegar volcano looks like it won’t hold up to Jimmy and Timmy’s research into sea bears. They do their bit where Nathan tries to sabotage the sea bear experiment, but he ends up making their project even better. All the while Mimsy keeps spilling the beans about how they are up to no good. It’s a standard formula for South Park but not one that’s outworn its welcome.
The science fair takes an interesting turn when men in suits arrive at the school to help fund Jimmy and Timmy’s research. The kids are surprised to learn that the men are not from the government but from the NFL. They explain that they are interested in making sentient sea bears in an effort to recoup their losses from people boycotting the NFL over the anthem protests. There is some decent setup for some jokes and social commentary, but no payoff. The lack of anything to say about the NFL’s situation makes this entire A-plot feel empty and superficial.
Now that she has fully embraced Cartman’s influence, Heidi has become more menacing than her boyfriend in many respects. She can harness the anger of Cartman and actually apply effort and dedication to her plots unlike her boyfriend— never mind that Cartman has put in effort and followed through on many plots over the years. Short memories aside, Heidi continues to unravel as Cartman stops supporting her. There doesn’t seem to be any deeper meaning here. The allegory for Trump supporters has been left behind after the end of the last episode. This episode ends feeling more like filler and a set up for future episodes instead of a memorable addition to the series.
Featured image from South Park Archives
(11/29/17 8:42pm)
by Jeremy Rogers
If you’ve watched PBS kids, Boomerang, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, CNN, AMC, TBS, Nickelodion, Discovery, or Animal Planet within the last two decades, there is a good chance you’ve already seen the work of Douglass Grimmett and his animation company, Primal Screen.
When Grimmett came to Ball State to talk about his company earlier this month, he talked about his childhood and how he got from being a kid who couldn’t draw to being the founder of a company that routinely works for Cartoon Network, PBS and Nickelodeon.
As a young child, Grimmett was inspired by the 1950 Oscar winning film Harvey to start drawing. The story of a man (Jimmy Stewart) who sees a 6’3” white rabbit named Harvey walking and talking with him that no one else can see or hear. Grimmett took his love of drawing to school with him, where he was the sole artist for his school’s newspaper. He drew comics such as In the Lunchroom and Butch Rotten, which was inspired by Goofus and Gallant, a comic series featured in Highlights magazine. After school, Grimmet went on to make his own independently published comic, Mindecay Funnies.
After a while Doug discovered that he didn’t like drawing that much, but he still loved using pictures to tell stories and relate to people. So he settled on using his talents to focus on graphic design instead of animation or illustration, difficult fields to break into if you are not good at drawing. Striking out and finding his strengths, in 1995 Grimmett founded Primal Screen, a digital design firm telling stories across every sort of screen. The company was involved in the redesign on Cartoon Network, the launching the Boomerang channel, relaunching Nick Jr., and several redesigns of the PBS Kids network.
The key to this success according to Grimmett? Embracing disruptive technology. In 1994, Adobe bought After Effects and started repackaging the revolutionary technology as Adobe After Effects. The next major disruption in the animation world was Photoshop 3.0, which introduced layers into the image creation process. Since desktop publishing all but destroyed typesetting, the next logical move for Primal Screen was to jump onto the bandwagon of the next technology out to destroy traditional motion picture production.
Embracing the next big thing was not Grimmett’s only advice to the attendees of his lecture. He also emphasized the importance of being adaptable, using Primal Screen as an example. While most people associate individual animators with their own signature styles, being an animation company means being able to adapt to and create new, unique styles. Having the versatility to tackle Adult Swim’s thin borders and gritty aesthetic as well as PBS Kids’ outline-less, solid color look is invaluable to Primal Screen’s success.
[video width="1280" height="720" mp4="http://bytebsu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/634643868.mp4"][/video]
The three big takeaways from Grimmett’s presentation?
(11/30/17 5:08pm)
Films are a hugely collaborative undertaking, often requiring dozens of people from different backgrounds and with hugely divergent skill sets to work long hours finish their film on time. One of the less glamorous yet still vital roles in film production is that of the sound editor.
(11/28/17 12:10am)
by Jeremy Rogers
Films are a hugely collaborative undertaking, often requiring dozens of people from different backgrounds and with hugely divergent skill sets to work long hours finish their film on time. One of the less glamorous yet still vital roles in film production is that of the sound editor.
To get an idea of what it is like to be a sound editor, we got some insight from Vickie Sampson. Though she has recently turned to directing, Vickie has spent over 40 years editing audio for Hollywood hits like Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Donnie Darko, and The Fifth Element. The Ball State Daily News interviewed Vickie when she came to campus to screen her newest film Shelby’s Vacation this past September. We got a hold of her to ask her about lessons she has learned over her 40-year career.
https://vimeo.com/174415605
(11/15/17 8:25pm)
by Ryan Fine
The cult superstar emo band, Brand New, has cancelled the remainder of its United Kingdom tour after its frontman Jesse Lacey was accused of sexual misconduct with minors and made a public Facebook post in response to the allegations last Saturday.
Late last week, a former guitar tech for the band made a public Facebook post (which has since been deleted) about rumors regarding possible sexual misconduct by Lacey. A woman named Nicole Elizabeth Garey replied to the thread and claimed that the singer solicited her for nude photos when she was 15. According to her account, the last contact she had with him was several years later, when he called her on Skype while pleasuring himself.
Pitchfork spoke to Garey and another woman named Emily Driskill. By the time she was 16, Driskill was a concert photographer and music journalist, and she says she was put in contact with Jesse Lacey through a mutual friend. In the Pitchfork article, she recounts Lacey staring at her chest, making inappropriate comments, and later threatening to cut off access to the band unless she agreed to send nude photos and take part in sexual video chat sessions.
Lacey then made a lengthy post on Brand New’s Facebook page addressing the allegations and seeming to imply that they were true. He attributed his actions to “a dependent and addictive relationship with sex.” He also detailed cheating in his past and present relationships, said he is working to improve his behavior and ultimately apologized for his actions.
On Monday, it was announced that Brand New would be cancelling all remaining tour dates in support of their recently released final album Science Fiction. They will supposedly be postponed for a later date, and as previously planned, the band is scheduled to disband after its 2018 tour dates.
Sources: Facebook, Pitchfork, SPIN, NPR
Image : flippen music
(11/07/17 1:00pm)
The latest entry into South Park’s newest season is all about the opioid crisis. However, it isn’t predominantly poor and middle class white people who are the primary subjects of the new opioid crisis but instead costumed mascot performers.
(11/06/17 4:15pm)
South Park returned this week to deliver a prequel for their upcoming video game South Park: The Fractured But Whole. The episode follows Cartman and the gang as they try to agree on a strategy to launch their over-complicated superhero franchise. Even before any filming starts, the group’s arch-enemy Professor Chaos and his alter ego Butters Stotch are hard at work sowing chaos into the world and stopping Coon and Friends.
(11/02/17 2:38pm)
by Jeremy Rogers
Some documentaries are propelled by their subject matter, relying on the intrigue and drama of their subject to propel the film forward and to keep the audience’s interest. Other documentaries are driven by the filmmaking artistry of the director. Davis Schumacher’s The New Fire, which had its world premiere at Heartland Film Festival 2017, is a prime example of the latter.
Differing from other environmentally focused documentaries which often focus on the doom and gloom of Earth’s future, The New Fire is as optimistic as its title suggests. There is a new fire ready to light the way forward in the United States, and that fire is engineered by bright millennials and fueled by nuclear fission.
The film does a fantastic job explaining complex topics to the audience without ever condescending. The complexities of engineering challenges faced by nuclear physicists is laid bare in simplistic explanations and beautifully rendered animated segments that illustrate how the various designs for different reactors work.
As the filmmakers acknowledged both in the film and in the after-film Q&A session, nuclear power is a hard sell to most people who grew up in the Cold War era. This is one of the biggest issues facing the nuclear energy movement. The New Fire does an amazing job at convincing its audience of its pro-nuclear power arguments.
This is accomplished through the multitude of interviews with world renowned nuclear physicists and climate scientists. Some of the universities represented by their scientists include MIT, UC Berkley and Columbia University. Footage is even taken from the Paris Climate Talks of 2015 of top climate scientists conceding that nuclear energy must be embraced to achieve a carbon neutral energy infrastructure throughout the world.
The film follows a few startups that are focused on bringing about a nuclear revolution in the United States: Transatomic Power, TerraPower and Oklo.
Transatomic Power and Oklo are the product of enterprising, young nuclear engineers. Terrapower is a bit different, but it illustrates the legitimacy of the pursuit of a nuclear power solution (as if several scientists holding doctorates in nuclear energy isn’t enough). The Chairman of the Board of Terrapower is none other than Bill Gates, a man not widely known for making poor financial decisions.
The film does not get bogged down in the processes of making energy or with the struggles of engineering; the film’s audience is the everyman, not nuclear scientists. The film mostly focuses on how ill equipped the US government is at addressing the energy needs of an increasingly carbon conscious world and how to change that.
Another element that stands in stark relief to the average climate or energy focused documentary is the emphasis put on the opportunities that lay in the nuclear field. This optimism that practically oozes through portions of the film never seems misplaced or naïve; there are real opportunities to be seized in this sector of the energy market that has been practically abandoned since the late 1980s. The worldwide market for nuclear power is changing, and the film expertly shows how embracing nuclear could propel the United States to the forefront of the world’s emerging nuclear energy economy.
Opportunity is not the only area of nuclear power explored in The New Fire. There are many challenges to overcome in the nuclear field, public relations notwithstanding. Much of the legislative structure surrounding nuclear reactors and their regulations are centered around decade old models. This creates a problem for engineers not working with water-cooled reactor structures. There are also issues with funding. As one MIT professor says, “A nuclear reactor is not an app; this is not the kind of idea that can be fueled on pizza and lines of code. The risk is proportional to the reward, and this is about as big as it gets.”
In addition to the fantastic graphics, the simple explanations from dramatically overqualified people and inspiring tone, one of the biggest surprises of the documentary is the sudden musical number rendered by Eric Myer, an opera-singing nuclear power activist. During the segment covering the Paris Climate Accord, two activists hand out their pro-nuclear book to anti-nuclear activists, and an impromptu performance is given on a train. After the film, Meyers revealed that he had originally studied to be an opera singer, later deciding to move to the less crowded job market of the opera-singing nuclear activist. Now in addition to using his musical talents, he also runs a nuclear power advocacy group, Generation Atomic.
The film does not completely dismiss renewable forms of energy just because the subjects of the film have devoted their lives to nuclear power. Wind and solar power are discussed as being limited in feasibility, but instances of renewables doing good for energy infrastructure are shown as well. The films spends time in Gabar, Senegal, showing how even something as small as a row of solar panels can help people in energy deficient communities. The message of the filmmakers and of the multitude of scientists featured is not that nuclear should be the only way people generate power but that nuclear should be the main way for people to generate power.
In addition to opera singers, filmmakers, and nuclear physicists, Suzanne Jaworski, the chief of staff of the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy shared the current administration’s stance on coal and nuclear power. She claimed that both President Trump and Energy Secretary Perry were open to the idea of expanding the US’ nuclear power capabilities.
Donald Trump and Rick Perry aren’t the only politicians warming up to the idea of a nuclear-powered future. In the year that had passed between the filming and the premiere, other government officials have started to pave the way for now legislation to help reignite the new wave of nuclear innovation in the United States.
Image: Kickstarter