Mars and the Phoenix lander

I thought this may be a good subject to choose for my production assignment at the University of Canberra. The criteria is as follows…

“Research a current-affairs topic and build a reference page or site. This will give the intelligent reader a thorough background to the topic and provide links to information – textual, image, video, audio. Use other sites – good and bad – to help you understand how clarity of exposition, site structure, impartiality, navigation and layout contribute to an authoritative presentation of factual information. Refer to these examples in your rationale.”

The Phoenix Lander is so far the most successful mission to Mars man has ever made. It is the 6th successful landing on Mars out of 12 missions. Every time a new discovery or any incident involving the Phoenix Lander is made, immediately we see it on the evening news. This makes it not only a current affairs topic but also a piece of history, and possibly, according to psychedelic theorists, man’s only hope for salvation. It’s important to remember though that this mission has been 8 years in the making and cost around $520 million dollars. So i have my doubts we will be living on Mars anywhere in the near future. Another great reason for choosing this subject is that all multimedia material produced by NASA is completely free to use in which ever way i want. Thats a plus of this tax payer funded company.

One thing i did not want to do in this assignment was to use a blogging website as a means of presentation. However in the end i really had no options available to me. The main reason for this was blog posts appear in reverse chronological order – ie. the most recent to the least, and i have no idea how to change this if i can in fact change it, and because i am not building as i go, rather i am researching then building all at once. I could have, had i thought of it previously, used the reverse chronological order to my benefit and put in posts on the dates that had significant progress or news to report. Damn… thats a sweet idea, now it appears as though i have done this all in one day, rather than as i go which i have not. Or have I? It was more convenient to me to spend my whole “day before the assignment was due” building this site, so i know what i have done and not wasting time looking at what i did yesterday or the day before as i have done in the past.

A subject like this has an immense amount of research to go along with it. There is so much information available on the internet not all of it useful. I figured the best place to start would be the NASA home page, the ones who foot the bill for and launched the Phoenix Lander. From there i went to the University of Arizona homepage, wired.com for a look at some images, twitter and a whole bunch more. More of it was useful than not, and quite user friendly and easy to find information, others… not so much. With over 1,300,000 pages with information on the phoenix lander, i had to be pretty selective.

Mars and the Phoenix lander

Ok so trouble averted. I have made my decision for my production assignment. “MARS AND THE PHOENIX LANDER”. A reference site about what is actually happening on Mars, who is involved, what they are trying to do, find out and the means of how they are doing it and what the next mission to mars hopes to accomplish. TRo Infinty, and beyond!!! Or just mars and beyond the outer surface.

Production Assignment #1

I dont know how every one else is faring but i am having quite a lot of trouble with this assignment. After finding out my original idea of “Artists of Marvel” will infringe copyright laws and not having enough time to await a reply from marvel whether or not i can use the images i am stuck. So i have no way of curating an online exhibition, i know not enough in regard to website designs to track the information flow from a website, so i have decided to create a reference page to a current affairs topic. But what constitutes a current affair? Not to sound selfish but i feel all the “good” ones will be taken, now i am left decide and build a website with just over a week remaining. Why am i so lazy? Never to mind i will impress.

Production House’s/Homes

Why can’t they be called production homes? We looked around this morning for some webites of things we are interested in. I chose to look up some production houses, local and interstate and the differences were plenty. I started with local Canberra production house Bearcage. Their website is designed for 2 sorts of people. People wanting work done for them, and people wanting to work with them. Being a production company they need to show a decent body of work on the website in order to attract more clients. In this case, less may be more. Another site i found was ProMotion, a multimedia production house on the Gold coast. This is a very shiny, clean looking website, which i find hard to trust. There is minimal body of work shown on this website, so im not sure if this is a fairly new company or they just don’t get a lot of work. The work they do show looks quite nice, although I don’t know what the object in the website is supposed to be. Maybe a phone? Or like a blackberry?

Into the shadows – UPDATE

A quick little update on Into the shadows, Andrew and Phil have finally come that little closer to finishing Into the Shadows by cutting it from a monster 6 hours into a neat 2 hours, still wanting to remove about 20 minutes from the feature. They have also started a “laptop journal”, a series of videos on youtube, documenting the films progress with the first one online now which you can see here at paperstreethooligans. I also realize that i spelt “hooligans”, “holligans”. For that i wish i could say sorry, but it shouldnt affect anyone other than myself, and if it does affect you please let me know.

Into the shadows

Into The Shadows is a documentary by two young Canberra men, also two good friends of mine, about the Australian film industry. This film addresses some major issues facing aussie film in the next ten years and interviews some of the industries top players like George Miller, Bruce Beresford, Brendan Cowell, Megan Spencer, Robert Connolly, Andrew Denton and our very own Michael Sergi. Into the shadows tells us, the cinema was once a place where Australian culture permeated; audiences were educated, entertained and enthralled about Australian history, characters and landscapes. Alarmingly, out of the $895.4 million spent at the Australian Box Office in 2007, only $36million (4%) was spent on Australian films. Amongst the story of decline are the seedlings for hope. Into the Shadows is the film to bring all of the complex dimensions of Australian cinema together and ask ‘how do we want Australian cinema to evolve?’

I feel that Phil and Andrew the directors of Into The Shadows, have hit upon a topic that should be of great concern to any film lover in Australia. Into the Shadows is currently nearing the end of post production and the release is still TBA. If you care you will check out their website, www.intotheshadowsmovie.com

Zeppelin lives on

Many people may or may not remember Michael Winslow from the Police Academy films, AKA the sound effects guy. This video is a couple years old and it shows SFX guy portraying Jimmy Page from Led Zepplin and his amazing style all with his mouth. Pretty damn good if you ask me. Have a look, comment if you want. Immigrant song lives on.

Paper Street Hooligans wants to introduce itself

Paperstreet Hooligans is a blog mainly about Film, comics, video games and other random sometimes stupid but always interesting stuff, created in conjunction with the Networked media production course at the University of Canberra. I chose to make this site on wordpress.com for the only reason that is is a much more design freindly program than tumblr.com where i made my first attempt at creating a blog with its easy to use but difficult to customize dashboard. On with the blogging!!