The Creativity and Influence in a Digital Era

With several advances, the digital age has brought us many new innovative and unique ways of completing work, developing art, and inner connecting, or social networking, with other people around the world. It has benefitted us in so many ways. Such things as being able to access videos, documentaries, audio files, pictures and portraits, and other things incredibly fast. Years ago, this would have never been possible. Yet even with all these technological advances, in my mind, I feel like such advances and changes have also brought somewhat of a demise to creativity and social interaction. It becomes more common now to email, text, and message other individuals in order to come in contact with them. Due to this unfortunate, and although easy, means of communication, we have become much less reliant of personal face to face confrontations, something that used to have quite a bit a stature only years ago. I feel that not enough can be worded with in digital messages to completely express what could be better worded in a personal confrontation. This can even be lengthened to individual art forms. In filmmaking,  there have been multiple advances in technology. The digital era has provided young filmmakers with the opportunity to shoot faster, easier, and cheeper footage with completely digital cameras. Film is no longer required, occasionally less lights, less time is consumed, and fewer people are needed. However I feel this has greatly impacted the industry in a negative way. Any given person can look at an image on a large screen and determine whether or not it had been computer generated or was model work (I appreciate model work, and everything real-in-camera better than anything computerized). Many people can also look at a film and tell over all whether it was shot digitally, or on a film format. With film, filmmakers would spend more time during each setup, making sure everything was perfect, no matter how long it would take, due to limited film stock. With this in mind, after the film was processed, the images that would come back were so beautiful and crisp. But with the use of digital, cameras can be kept rolling. There is no limited film stock, it is limitless. The DP can just dump all of the data and footage onto a hard-drive and keep uploading directly onto a computer. Quite a few people may argue that this is a positive. I disagree in the belief that it is affecting the quality of the overall product, resulting in sloppy work that continually looks more artificial, and less like reality. Film has a unmatchable beauty and quality to it. With all of its imperfections and grain, it offers us such a unique way to watch physically moving images through a projector. Digital does not provide me with that at least.

Overall, as always, digital will have its pros and cons. It provides us with an easier way of doing things. easier methods of mass communication (especially that of the news, and entertainment industry). It assists in making eduction easier to reach. In many ways, it also helps us become more "green", using less valuable recourses.  But you just have to ask one big question: Are you satisfied with the over all quality with the result of what is being produced?

Who Were They Really, During Vietnam?

Long before Vietnam or Cambodia ever became the country they are today, there existed a purely native group people that eventually became known as the Montagnards. Coined by the French nearly hundreds of years ago, the Montagnard means "people of the mountain, or mountain dweller". They lived peacefully and sustained a fully working and structured community, until the French released the rule of the country to the Vietnamese people, making it purely independent. The culture and base of the whole country soon began to crumble, leaving confusion and violence. The Montagnards fled their communities, and hid in the jungle. All during this process, Americans invaded the country and intern began the Vietnam War. During the near 20 year period that both countries were involved, they had to struggle through the harshest of environments. The Montagnards were forced deeper into the brutal Vietnamese jungle. For sometime, the Montagnard Degar people had increasing tensions with the Vietnam majority.Both the Montagnard's political and social views were quite different than how the Vietnamese saw it. In the early 1960's, we began to see contact being made from the Montagnard Degar people and the US. Slowly, they began to be trained by American forces in unconventional war. Soon nearly thousands of Montagnard Degar people began fighting along side American forces, especialy once we began working along the Ho Chi Minh trail. As the end of the war finally came into sight, the Montagnard Degar people fled the country, moving into the United States. It wasn't until 1986, when a large sum of the population began making the long trip. Once in the country, they settled all around, but especially rooted in North Carolina.  Through the mid 1970's, through the late 1980's, several major motion pictures captured what they believed the Vietnam War to have been. Films such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter, and Full Metal Jacket were releases over a period of 20 years. All of the motion pictures seemed to have a very similar outlook onto how the natives and locals were treated with in vietnam. Was the relationship between the Montagnard Degar people displayed truthfully in the films, or exaggerated. Did Americans miss treat them, or did we work well together and sustained a good relationship, fighting side by side? 

"There were too many of us, we had access to too much equipment, too much money, and little by little we went insane. My movie is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam"  - Francis Ford Coppola

The Framing of Society

Framing to me has become a more personal matter. A structure constructed strait from the interiors of the mind based on previous experiences with that particular subject or related topics. In many senses, it is an opinion, or judgment. When I first began reading and researching the idea of Framing, it sounded more and more of a deeper theory than just plain judgment. However, the major difference is the fact that framing requires a larger amount knowledge and  research in order to come to an honest, true, and philosophical conclusion. Judgment on the other hand, seems to be based more on a first encounter. People judge others immediately by clothing, speaking, overall appearance. On a larger scale, framing is how we can categorize large amounts of information about a particular subject that we have acquired over a longer time span. It has been introduced as, and become, an important thinking skill that determines not necessarily what we see, but how we see it.