[Manic Monday] Rethinking The Movies, With A Digital Twist

The movie and cinema has been around for at least 100 years already, and by principle it remains largely unchanged. A camera records sequential images upon a medium, which is then duplicated, and spread to locations with projectors and screens. The sequence of images is projected onto a screen. The technology has definitely progressed light years from those old hand-operated cameras, the medium is in a major shift from celluloid to digital (not to mention the advances in post-production technology, from sound, cinematography to CGI), and the ‘locations’ are now highly-specialized buildings, with comfortable seating, optimized screens and powerful cinema projectors. But the essence remains the same.

The arrival of broadcast television did not turn the movie industry upside down – the moving picture industry expanded into highly specialized fields in moviemaking and TV production (among others). Although the TV is probably one of the 20th century’s most recognizable – and most ubiquitous – feature, it never supplanted the cinema as a form of audiovisual entertainment – if ever, TV became a marketing tool to get people in cinemas on a movie opening day. And of course, TV airings of the same movie far after the cinema release enabled residual income and thus adding to the movie producer’s income.

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[Manic Monday] MTV EXIT; Entertainment + Digital For Pro-Social Causes

I think all of my articles to this date have been talking about the digital entertainment business and how various parts of that business- the artist or musician, the music label, the movie studio, the service provider, and so on – on how to create new business or expand on existing ones. In other words, how to make money. But it became apparent to me that digital entertainment is not always just about money, and I need to talk about something that uses digital entertainment to promote pro-social causes.

There are many pro-social movements that employ digital elements totheir campaigns, but I’d like to discuss about a pro-social movementthat uses a very familiar brand: MTV. Everybody knows MTV – whether or not they remain relevant in today’s entertainment scene will remain tobe seen – but not many people know that there are some pro-social movements using the MTV brand that are actually separate entities from MTV.

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[Manic Monday] I’m Addicted To SongPop

This past Ramadhan holiday, I have finally surrendered and accepted various invitations – no, challenges – to play SongPop. At first, I didn’t want to invest myself in yet again another ‘versus’ game platform which I would be neglecting (sorry, Draw Something friends who have been nudging me for the past month), but I finally relented and have been playing ever since. My wife has also started playing (she’s a fellow music geek) and I must admit that I haven’t the slightest clue about ‘Today’s Hits’ or ‘Punk’.

The game hits people from various sides – some like it because it challenges their song repertoire (I suck, apparently), some like the friendly competition it gives, and for others, it’s an opportunity to rediscover music. Old songs seemingly forgotten, that tune that you know the title yet don’t seem to remember the title or artist, or finally matching a riff to a song. And the more people play it, the more songs and songlists they can unlock with the hard-earned coins. Well, if you consider yourself a music fan and you haven’t played, I do recommend giving it a spin.

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