Video lecture for week 3 of CMST 10100, “Introduction to Film Analysis.”
Month: April 2020
Siren: Tension, Frustration and Visibility
Group project summary, by leader John Churay
Siren is a survival horror/stealth game developed by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan Studio. The game takes a third-person over the shoulder point of view. Movement in the game uses tank controls, so left and right on the movement stick rotate the character instead of moving them. Unlike more traditional third-person viewpoints, the camera does not move around your avatar. Moving the right stick can change the camera’s orientation, but it is stuck squarely behind your character. The game consists of levels that often revolve around moving from one spot on a map to another. Along the way, you pick up items, defeat enemies known as “Shibito,” and escort AI companions. To pick up items, you must open a menu using triangle and select to pick up that item.
(Image credit: exceeding09 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7zmvKPlC8g)
You use this process to interact with almost all objects in the game, including unlocking doors and entering specific key locations. In the reboot Siren: Blood Curse, this process is streamlined to pressing the X button. However, using the flashlight in the remake requires using a menu, which is not the case in the original. In each level, you can access a map of the area. In the remake only, this is decorated with your position and the locations you need to visit to accomplish tasks. There are multiple characters who you will play as throughout the game; however, there is no choice on who you play in any given level.
A Look Into Parasite’s Decor
by Zach Cogan, Meagan Johnson, Dylan Kanaan, Gabriela Horwath, and Alan Countess
Position of the Houses: How it Reflects a Class Struggle
Kim House
The Kim house is below ground in a busy and cluttered area of poor families with people disrespecting their home (including a couple of drunk men peeing on the property). Their house itself has very poor lighting and really the only pieces of technology are outdated, insufficient for their daily lives, and are in very bad shape. Their house has a very unorthodox structure to it, yet it can also be said that the Kims are very good at using what they have in order to make it work, regardless of the clutter that it creates in their home (E.g. socks drying on a ceiling fan and trying to latch onto any wifi possible). They have supplies for work (pizza boxes) stacked everywhere and store clutter in every room. Even the toilet is in a strange place, sitting on top of a ledge. There appears to be no beds in the home. In the opening scenes of the film, we see the patriarch of the Kim family resting his eyes and lying in a fetal position atop a thin rug. This layout shows how they manage to scrape by using what they have in the most efficient way possible. The family has this massive window that they have to look up to see out of. This could be a metaphor for the family wanting to climb up the socioeconomic ladder and take on a world that they don’t feel is theirs. On the outside of the window, it looks almost as if it is barred. This again shows how they are locked away from the rest of the world, unable to succeed and advance up the socioeconomic ladder.
Intro to Film Week 2 Video Lecture: Mise-en-scène
The first full video lecture for CMST 10100 “Introduction to Film Analysis,” on the topic of mise-en-scène.
Videogames and Genre Storytelling Week 2 Video Lecture: Special Topics in Horror and Character Alignment
Please find some time to view this 22-minute video lecture between now and our Zoom conference call, which will convene at the normal time. You can expect our Zoom conference call to be shorter and more discussion-based as a result.
Intro to Film: Preliminary mini-lecture
A preliminary mini-lecture for CMST 10100 “Introduction to Film Analysis,” in advance of our first official full video lecture.
Blog Re-organization for Online Teaching
Ian here—
Just a quick heads-up that I’m doing some minor re-organization to this blog in response to the shift to remote learning this quarter at U Chicago. It’s not exactly unusual to see student posts on this blog, but now they’ll be accompanied by a swath of asynchronous video lectures I’ve been putting together. It’s going to be a real firehose of activity, making up for a dry spell over here since December.
If you’d just like to see the usual announcements about general-audience video essays and things like that, click the helpful “Posts by Ian” tab to clear out the online teaching material.
HER STORY Complete Transcript
Ian here, cooped up during the shelter-in-place order and busy prepping for this quarter’s classes.
So I did that thing again, where I’m preparing to teach and/or critically analyze a game, make a guide for myself, and I figure I might as well put it online for public consumption. This time, it’s a complete transcript of all of the video assets in HER STORY, Sam Barlow’s 2015 full-motion video adventure that plays devious games with its script, before it ever adopted video format.
If you’ve ever wanted to fill in a pesky block in the HER STORY‘s in-game Database Checker while chasing the “Detective Chief Inspector” achievement, this guide is for you. As for me, it will be a course tool when I teach the game again this quarter, and it forms the research backbone of my next video essay.
Intermittent Mechanism 