Topic 209

Live arts: digital effects, choreography, lighting, marketing by Su Chen

All the things listed above are related with IT in a way or another. One might think that choreography is not really related but if you connect the dots, you'll see a link. This isn't related to the topic but as I am writing this, I realized that almost everything is related to IT in today's world. The internet you use, when you talk to your friends on MSN, when you go to the doctor and they make your receipt and when you buy things at a convenience store! Almost everything is related to IT. Imagine an intense power failure for a day – what would your life be like?

Digital effects are used in movies and pictures. I personally use a lot of photo software to get the desired photograph. Sometimes the picture's too bright or too dark so I use the sliders to get the perfect lighting going on and there's all these other cool options like fading, sepia, antique which can make your picture stand out from the other pictures. Digital effects can really make someone look at your picture because of the way they stand out from the others.

Digital effects are mainly used in movies. Let me rephrase it, since a movie is quite long more digital effects are used in a movie then in a 2MB photo. I haven't personally had any experience with this but some of my friends have and they use many movie making software to get the right timing in their movies. For instance this friend of mine was making a movie about winter sports at SMIS and he used a software to combine all the different clips from different sports and then got an awesome song and put it with the clips. Along with all this, he used the fade in-fade out effects to make the transition of the different clips smooth.

Choreography, in simple terms, is the act of dancing. How is this IT related? It took me quite a while to think about that but then I remembered a friend of mine who was watching this choreographer give lessons, on her computer! Since it was on her computer, she could forward-rewind the video according to what she wanted to see. She could also reduce the speed of the steps the choreographer was showing and observe them carefully! And of course the choreographer herself can hire a moviemaker guy to add the slow-fast effects to her movie.

Lighting is related to digital effects and I already discussed the lighting in my photos. I use the brightness, exposure and contrast sliders to adjust the lighting in my pictures so people's faces can be seen clearly! And today's camcorders have this function called "Night Mode" which helps people record movies at night in the dark and that helps people see in the dark. Then you can use your computer to add even more light to the movie.

When directors finally have their movie ready, they hire advertisers who can let the people know about the movie and they do this by placing the ads for the movies all over the internet. That's a form of marketing – letting people know about your products and this is usually done using internet today and the ads placed by Google!