chi-chu.tschang.net

MAS S61 assignment #1: media diet

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 23:26:00 -0500

This semester, I am taking Ethan Zuckerman’s class News and Participatory Media at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. For our first assignment, we had to keep a log of our media consumption for a week. This is my media diet for the week of February 8-14, 2012.

It’s unusually warm in Boston.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:09:03 -0500

It’s unusually warm in Boston.

Who Says Colombians are All Drug Traffickers?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:11:40 -0500

What I’ll remember the most about the experience working in Bogota is the kindness and generosity of everyone I met in Colombia. For this G-Lab class, one of our final deliverables is to come up with a poster to showcase the work we did for our G-Lab client Oruga Touching Dreams. In the process of trying to figure out what to put on our poster last week, we decided to check with Oruga Touching Dreams to see if they could send us some of their character animations to put on our poster. Oruga Touching Dreams CEO & executive producer Pedro Tosin readily agreed and assigned one of his animators Harry Villamil to go through Oruga Touching Dreams’ database and pull up some character animations for us. But after waiting a day, Harry Villamil still hadn’t sent us the characters animations. It turns out that Pedro Tosin had pushed back one of Oruga Touching Dreams’ deadline for a client by a day and asked three animators to do the poster for us! Oruga Touching Dreams even created the caterpillar and butterfly just for our poster. Mucho gracias Oruga Touching Dreams por lo que el G-Lab como una experiencia increible en Colombia.

I’m not too sure what this is, but they’re selling...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:39:27 -0500

I’m not too sure what this is, but they’re selling it at an orange juice stand on the side of the road.

The most interesting coffee stand I’ve ever seen

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:32:19 -0500

The most interesting coffee stand I’ve ever seen

Photo

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:30:49 -0500

Photo

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:29:40 -0500

Photo

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:28:07 -0500

Occupy Colombia

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:26:43 -0500

Occupy Colombia

Revolucion

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:24:54 -0500

Revolucion

What’s with all the paint splatter on El Tiempo’s...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:23:20 -0500

What’s with all the paint splatter on El Tiempo’s building?

Plaza de Bolivar

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:20:56 -0500

Plaza de Bolivar

Smiley faces make everything better

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:19:13 -0500

Smiley faces make everything better

Guess which one is the counterfeit Colombian peso.

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:15:24 -0500

Guess which one is the counterfeit Colombian peso.

At Burger King in Bogota, Colombia, they have a counter to order...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:14:07 -0500

At Burger King in Bogota, Colombia, they have a counter to order burgers…

…and a separate counter for dessert

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:12:15 -0500

…and a separate counter for dessert

Cartagena, Colombia

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:09:46 -0500

Cartagena, Colombia

How Botero is Relevant to Oruga

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:24:15 -0500

This morning, our G-Lab team went to the Museo Botero to visit an exhibit by Fernando Botero. The self-anointed “the most Colombian of Colombian artists” is known his unique style of depicting human figures, animals and objects with an exaggerated corpulence to not only celebrate the life within them but also mock their role in the world. Fernando Botero didn’t develop his own style until he was in his early 30s, after he had left Colombia, studied in France and Italy, then moved to Mexico, where he was influenced by Diego Riveria’s mural paintings.

For the past three months or so, our G-Lab team has been reaching out to advertising agencies and sales reps to get critical feedback on our G-Labclient Oruga Touching Dreams’ reel. One of the feedbacks we received from the American ad agencies Oruga Touching Dreams should to develop its own style to succeed in the U.S. because creative directors will often hire animation studios based on whether their style is a good fit for a particular ad campaign. In Colombia, it’s a bit harder for Oruga Touching Dreams to do because oftentimes, their clients will want them to copy ad campaigns from Madison Avenue. That’s not to say that Oruga Touching Dreams hasn’t tried. In 2008, the studio released a 15-minute short-film entitled “En Agosto,” which has a much darker style than a lot of the cartoony animation work that Oruga Touching Dreams normally does. Like Fernando Botero, it may take leaving Colombia for Oruga Touching Dreams to fully develop its own distinctive style.

What color Shakira's hair really is

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:59:00 -0500

This past week, our team took some time out of our G-Lab project for Oruga Touching Dream and devoted the time help out amplificado.tv. Oruga Touching Dream’s creative director Augusto Caro created amplificado.tv in his spare time to create a platform for Colombian musicians outside the mainstream to showcase their work online. Unfortunately, amplificado.tv’s web site is only in Spanish. Our team spent some time translating and writing much of amplificado.tv’s web site content in English, which will hopefully expose the musicians showcased on amplificado.tv to the world outside of Colombia. As a result, I’ve recently spent a lot of time listening to Colombian music. Reggaeton is really popular here in Colombia.

We were talking about music with Oruga Touching Dream’s CFO Diego Diaz del Castillo Fernandez and inevitably, Shakira came up. Without a doubt, Colombia’s biggest cultural export is Shakira. I learned a three things about Shakira:

1) Before Shakira made the cross over from Colombia to the U.S., she acted in the telenovela El Oasis in 1996. Apparently, Shakira sang at an office holiday party and Diego’s mother, who was an executive at the TV station that broadcast El Oasis at the time, heard her sing and let Shakira sing the theme song for El Oasis, “Lo Mio.”

2) Shakira alienated a lot of her fans in Colombia. According to one theory, an interviewer asked her where she’s from, and instead of saying she’s Colombian, she said that she’s half Lebanese. Shakira was born in Barranquilla, Colombia to an American father of Lebanese descent and a Colombian mother with Italian.

3) Shakira is not a natural blond.

"El que muestra el hambre, no come."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:14:58 -0500

“El que muestra el hambre, no come.”