On Noir, Anxiety, and Account Creation!

Noir. Reminds me of Gothic literature in its vague boundaries, blending elements of different genres. Gothic, with its boundaries between what could be considered science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. Noir, with its crime, corruption, and mystery. Their similarities do not stop there as dark scenes, poorly lit streets, rainfall, and withheld information from the audience.

From watching The Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Bugs Bunny, Courageous Cat, and listening to Suspense!, other than the aforementioned similarities, one of the few things I can deduce from the film noir style is the amount of pointed language. Something is always wrong, whether in the foreground, the background, or off-screen. There is a pervasive feeling that anything can go wrong at any point, whether it can be altered is up to the determination of the director, artist, or writer. But the amount of anxiety the film noir style can inflict, as a tool, upon the audience ushers the viewer from scene to scene hoping for some sort of resolution.

In The Watchmen, it is Rorschach’s story, and the Comedian’s demise. In The Dark Knight, it is obviously Batman’s anxiety, but also the city of Gotham’s, with which the audience sympathizes. Both movies beg the audience to ask, “Will the city continue to function? How will society react to this new peril?” Considering the plotlines of both, that question’s answer is muffled by the turmoil within their respective cities throughout the story. The tone of both movies silently answers with “No! They can’t!”, up until the climax of the storyline. That silent assumption that “this event could ruin the city permanently” seems to be a common theme among film noir selections.
The city has never seen trouble like this before.

I had a lot of fun this week! Setting up new accounts
was actually much less troublesome than trying to figure
out old login information I had previously used for some
of the services.

For example, I have a few Gmail accounts for different reasons, so I thought YouTube would be the easiest service to set up–all of my accounts could be potential submission terminals. I scrapped that idea as soon as I made the realization that I couldn’t use my UMW login information. So I went to Vimeo, which I have actually never interacted with save for the occasional embedded
video on a random website.

I really love Vimeo so far, YouTube seemed so visually cluttered to me with its white background, black text, and red “highlights”. I know there are much more customized pages than the ones I usually visit, but the ones I don’t visit don’t affect me. YouTube and Vimeo remind me of a decision I made, that you could relate to as well: Should I go to a small university or a large university? While there are positive and negative aspects for both, I feel like Vimeo focuses much more on the video itself as a standalone project, while YouTube focuses more on the “channel” (I really don’t like that nomenclature, it seems like a bad attempt to name something based on older technology [tv]). Vimeo feels more like a place where people would submit videos that they are proud of, that they’ve edited, and that they’ve spent time on, while I can’t help but shake my idea of YouTube as a place for 30 -second clips and advertisements. I was really worried about the reception of my YouTube clips, seeing as it is the “large university”, but the more private feeling of Vimeo has helped to curb my anxiety.

Another account I really enjoyed was Flickr. I have previously used a few different picture sharing sites, so I knew the drill. Flickr seems a lot more customizable than the previous sites I have used, so it feels like a workspace to me rather than a cloud storage site.

Aside from account creation and customization, this week has been very enjoyable. I do not have a very fast, reliable internet connection like this class recommends, so I have had much more trouble trying to determine which
service needs high-speed, and which I can use at my house on my satellite internet connection. But I had an “Aha!” moment today. I realized that I can just create my posts in plain text in a Notepad document, complete with links and all, save them, and then only need a high-speed connection for uploading and submission! That realization helped a lot too alleviate my stress about this class–my main stressor at the moment because of the warning e-mail.
Due to my lack of high-speed internet, I’ve created a sort of modular schedule for myself for this class that I’m really excited to try out! Being able to create video, photo, audio, and textual, and melding the four together is my main focus for this class, so I’m looking forward to teaching myself how to do more editing.
I introduced myself here, so if you would like to start a dialogue, feel free to contact me on any of the classes platforms! (Or Facebook, although not preferred–I’d rather keep discussions open on pages the rest of the class can view and readily operate, where instructors can chime in or view). @spencer_cscott is my Twitter handle, so try not to be a stranger on there!