On fandom and students and scifi and ...
Here, finally, is a report on the lecture I gave to the media studies students last week ... I very quickly learnt several things:
(1) The hardware in the rooms on the 3rd floor at our college is crap, and its pointless using the computers up there [thank goodness the ones on the lower floors where I do a lot of my lectures a better]. How Andreas and Sonia manage in their teaching rooms day to day I don't know! I took the laptop in with me from the second session, attached it to the Smart Board (I have the software on here already) and used Impress in Open Office instead of Powerpoint.
(2) Presentation software is all very well, but you have to either embed stuff or link to it on the Internet and that locks you into what you are saying - if you need to vary it depending on your audience you can't elegantly skip stuff .
(3) Open Office is very clever ... it allows you to save Powerpoint / Impress files as an acrobat 'slide show'. That means you still have the option of minimising the window and have access to images and AV files you have on your memory stick. This means you can also choose what to talk about (I only use the Powerpoint slides as outlines anyway) and just nip in and out of the presentation when you need to show other items. I also have Picassa on this and its got a very nifty viewer which springs up over what you are looking at which impressed the students no end.
(4) If I logged onto the Wifi in the Library I discovered (its only new BTW, and we are just learning to use it) its still possible to get internet access in the floors above. This was really useful when showing websites and stuff ...
Click on the cut below the image to enter ...
Slide 2
I gave a history of the 30 years of my fandoms (they are the ones on the first slide - can you guess which icon is from which one?)
I talked about the history of fandom - how people had been telling each other stories for thousands of years, and that fans were fans of the Greek Epics and Robin Hood and written stories in books (Dickens, Sherlock Holmes) before films and TV shows.
I mentioned the book Textual Poaching by Henry Jenkins.
Slide 3
I talked about what fans do (which we all know) and explained how important Fan Fiction is to our cause - gen, het and slash ...
Now, this was where things got interesting. What happened when I was talking to the first group the boys said, 'where's the hot girl on girl action?' and that made me think ... The SECOND time I did this I talked how fan fiction and Scifi have changed the way things (and women in particular) have been presented over the years ...
For example ... Barbarella and Uhura in the 1960s / 70s would (and did) have a hard time fighting in those dresses and with those high heels ... and now to come up to date Teyla from Stargate Atlantis may still SEEM to be a skimpily clad dolly bird, and she is dressed fairly stereotypically here, but she can and does regularily whup the men - John Sheppard who is a USAF Colonel etc - when she is teaching them her native fighting skills, and when she goes on missions she is dressed just like the men and can handle a P90. I pointed out that a lot of fans are women and so things have had to change over the years ...
I showed this clip from the SG1 episode Threads and asked the students to comment on the scene which I have taken as a screen grab below compared with the women who are shown above ...
General Jack is not really any different from the 1960s men ,obviously in charge as he is in uniform, Sam (despite being a girl) is now practical with a science PhD, short hair, and is to quote the boys 'more plainly dressed' (we can't even see her arms). It is Teal'c who is the alien eye-candy with the make-up, short sleeved clothing and the bulging muscles.
I then ran the rest of the clip and asked them to watch for Jack's camp/slashy body language and interaction with the flagged!Daniel who turns up in his office wearing very little (and who is also rather nice eye-candy and has a few bulging muscles). This lead to explaining how even the male actors encourage us to slash with kissing at conventions ... I showed this photo ...
and played them this clip. There were some girls who were obviously Pentecostal Christians (the only conventions they had heard of were Christian Conventions) who made a big fuss when I showed the photo, but understood it better when they saw the clip -how they were 'playing up' to the audience.
Next I talked about Meta, and how its basically writing essays on things like they do in class (and opened the file with the eight page Daniel/Ascension-meta-from-hell as an example) and told them about Redial_the_gate and how I regularly get blogged.
I talked about fan art and pointed out how this is us bringing our interests from outside the fandom to play in it showed them the cuddly Dalek (reapermum - the kids loved this and went 'awww!').
Slide 4
Then I talked about conventions, the type of ones we have, and the sort of things we get up to at them - the story about barging into a loo in Milton Keynes full of Hobbits (with FEET) made the students laugh. I also added how some of us move from attending them to helping run them- cue the story of me and the security guard at Milton Keynes or being hospitality at Wembley and walking half a mile with a glass of wine for Mr Thomas. I also explained that I was perfectly clear about the difference between my on screen heroes and the actors who play them. I told of my interactions with the actors in theatre I have known, and showed them a picture of Gareth Thomas in his heroic role:
The youngsters rather liked the goose-turd green jacket ... shows how things an fashion go round and come round again ...
And I told them it wasn't hard to differentiate when your hero was now over sixty, and last time you saw him he was showing your his bus pass! (He looks like my grandfather in this shot!). I did however tell them all he had to do was quote Shakespeare at me and I still ended up in a puddle of goo!
Slide 5
Then I also told them about my TV appearances and radio appearances ... I was going to show them some of the 'Making of' Mythmakers DVD we did at Betchworth/Gatton but the DVD refused to be either ripped (it crashed Orac the Mac) and wouldn't even play on Jolinar so I gave up. I HAD however successfully edited the BBC radio programme and was able to play some of that to them. Andreas then chipped in with the fact that fans are the repository of knowledge, and I said yes, that is what we do, we keep it alive, and you can't expect an actor to remember everything he has done, after 200 episodes in some shows or especially 30 years later in others! We also can translate hieroglyphs and Egyptian unlike some of the actors, but I did point out that was an outside-of-fandom activity which had been transferred in.
I also told them how is possible for fans to put pressure on the creators/producers and cited the Roj Blake/Daniel Jackson difference 20 years produced. I am SURE Gareth would have stayed put in B7 if he had had our pressure as the fans from Stargate used theirs (and the internet to do it over) when he wanted to shake things up a bit at the end of Series Two of B7. Michael Shanks from SG1 got to direct and write episodes and got shifted in the Opening Credits when he came back ... Paul McGillion (spelling magnavox_23?) from Atlantis got Carson Beckett back after the fans picketed the studios when TPTB killed him off for no real reason. WE ARE THE ONES WITH POWER IN THIS AND ARE NOT JUST PASSIVE CONSUMERS - thank goodness for the internet.
Slide 6
So what do the people involved get in all this and our involvement? We publicise their shows (to other fans in other fandoms and people who are not in any at all), keep stuff in the public view after a show ends, buy the merchandise ... We continue to follow actors after the shows have ended or moved on. This can also be used to the producers' advantages - I cited Claudia Black and Ben Browder being brought from Farscape to SG1 and how Jewel Staite was brought over on their whim from Firefly to Atlantis... mutter mutter ... The less said on that the better actually ... We go to conventions and the actors, directors etc. can get money for doing that ...
Slide 7
This was about my personal theories about why fans find these shows so interesting. I talked about how in today's secularised society perhaps he have lost touch with the stories we have told ourselves for millennia. I introduced Joseph Campbell, waved around a copy of The Power of Myth and talked about his book on the monomyth the Hero with a Thousand Faces. I explained how Christopher Vogler turned that into an 8 page memo for Disney on how to write a screenplay. It is now the book The Writers Journey. I also told them how Geoge Lucas used these ideas when writing Star Wars.
Slide 8
I then talked about what the fans get out of it - something to be enthusiastic about (I was sure this was genetic, my father is a train fan and can understand 'enthusiasts' corner' but my mother and sister can't) and fellow fans in a community to share their interests with. We get a creative and fannish outlet. I said I have always written stuff, its nice to have something to write about. I also said it can be therapy. Should I need to work something through I can borrow a character who is going through similar mental things and put them in a story and get them to do my emotions and working out by proxy. I have spoken to therapists and psychologists and they got very exited about people doing that. I also (without names) mentioned parvateal. After what you have gone through, my dear we need a fan fiction on what it felt like to be Daniel in Continuum ...
Slide 9
Here I quoted two quotes - one Andreas had given me :-
Films about the future might seem to be the most aloof from contemporary
social problems. Yet they frequently are characterised by radical positions
that are too extreme for Hollywood realism. In some respects, the genre that
seems most distant from the contemporary world is the one most free to
exercise accurate descriptions of its operations” (Michael Ryan and Douglas
Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary
Hollywood Film, p. 254).
and one I took from the transcript of Stargate SG1 200 ...
Science fiction is an existential metaphor. It allows us to tell stories about the
human condition. Isaac Asimov once said: "Individual science fiction stories
may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today,
but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our
salvation, if we are to be saved at all.“
• (‘Grell’, Stargate SG1, Episode10x6: ‘200’)
That made Andreas suggest I should come back to talk about Science Fiction and talking about how it is relevant to society. How classic StarTrek showed the first interracial kiss in 1968 and how they had the first female, black character as part of their command structure. How their communicators and data blocks became mobile phones and floppy discs. How in one of the movies (help me out here please) Kirk is seen climbing up Mount Rushmore and (how relevant this is now) in that depiction of the future along with the other presidents there was a black face amongst them ...
I rest my case ... but I may have to do something on SciFi for after Half Term (eek!).
(1) The hardware in the rooms on the 3rd floor at our college is crap, and its pointless using the computers up there [thank goodness the ones on the lower floors where I do a lot of my lectures a better]. How Andreas and Sonia manage in their teaching rooms day to day I don't know! I took the laptop in with me from the second session, attached it to the Smart Board (I have the software on here already) and used Impress in Open Office instead of Powerpoint.
(2) Presentation software is all very well, but you have to either embed stuff or link to it on the Internet and that locks you into what you are saying - if you need to vary it depending on your audience you can't elegantly skip stuff .
(3) Open Office is very clever ... it allows you to save Powerpoint / Impress files as an acrobat 'slide show'. That means you still have the option of minimising the window and have access to images and AV files you have on your memory stick. This means you can also choose what to talk about (I only use the Powerpoint slides as outlines anyway) and just nip in and out of the presentation when you need to show other items. I also have Picassa on this and its got a very nifty viewer which springs up over what you are looking at which impressed the students no end.
(4) If I logged onto the Wifi in the Library I discovered (its only new BTW, and we are just learning to use it) its still possible to get internet access in the floors above. This was really useful when showing websites and stuff ...
Click on the cut below the image to enter ...
Slide 2
I gave a history of the 30 years of my fandoms (they are the ones on the first slide - can you guess which icon is from which one?)
I talked about the history of fandom - how people had been telling each other stories for thousands of years, and that fans were fans of the Greek Epics and Robin Hood and written stories in books (Dickens, Sherlock Holmes) before films and TV shows.
I mentioned the book Textual Poaching by Henry Jenkins.
Slide 3
I talked about what fans do (which we all know) and explained how important Fan Fiction is to our cause - gen, het and slash ...
Now, this was where things got interesting. What happened when I was talking to the first group the boys said, 'where's the hot girl on girl action?' and that made me think ... The SECOND time I did this I talked how fan fiction and Scifi have changed the way things (and women in particular) have been presented over the years ...
For example ... Barbarella and Uhura in the 1960s / 70s would (and did) have a hard time fighting in those dresses and with those high heels ... and now to come up to date Teyla from Stargate Atlantis may still SEEM to be a skimpily clad dolly bird, and she is dressed fairly stereotypically here, but she can and does regularily whup the men - John Sheppard who is a USAF Colonel etc - when she is teaching them her native fighting skills, and when she goes on missions she is dressed just like the men and can handle a P90. I pointed out that a lot of fans are women and so things have had to change over the years ...
I showed this clip from the SG1 episode Threads and asked the students to comment on the scene which I have taken as a screen grab below compared with the women who are shown above ...
General Jack is not really any different from the 1960s men ,obviously in charge as he is in uniform, Sam (despite being a girl) is now practical with a science PhD, short hair, and is to quote the boys 'more plainly dressed' (we can't even see her arms). It is Teal'c who is the alien eye-candy with the make-up, short sleeved clothing and the bulging muscles.
I then ran the rest of the clip and asked them to watch for Jack's camp/slashy body language and interaction with the flagged!Daniel who turns up in his office wearing very little (and who is also rather nice eye-candy and has a few bulging muscles). This lead to explaining how even the male actors encourage us to slash with kissing at conventions ... I showed this photo ...
and played them this clip. There were some girls who were obviously Pentecostal Christians (the only conventions they had heard of were Christian Conventions) who made a big fuss when I showed the photo, but understood it better when they saw the clip -how they were 'playing up' to the audience.
Next I talked about Meta, and how its basically writing essays on things like they do in class (and opened the file with the eight page Daniel/Ascension-meta-from-hell as an example) and told them about Redial_the_gate and how I regularly get blogged.
I talked about fan art and pointed out how this is us bringing our interests from outside the fandom to play in it showed them the cuddly Dalek (reapermum - the kids loved this and went 'awww!').
Slide 4
Then I talked about conventions, the type of ones we have, and the sort of things we get up to at them - the story about barging into a loo in Milton Keynes full of Hobbits (with FEET) made the students laugh. I also added how some of us move from attending them to helping run them- cue the story of me and the security guard at Milton Keynes or being hospitality at Wembley and walking half a mile with a glass of wine for Mr Thomas. I also explained that I was perfectly clear about the difference between my on screen heroes and the actors who play them. I told of my interactions with the actors in theatre I have known, and showed them a picture of Gareth Thomas in his heroic role:
The youngsters rather liked the goose-turd green jacket ... shows how things an fashion go round and come round again ...
And I told them it wasn't hard to differentiate when your hero was now over sixty, and last time you saw him he was showing your his bus pass! (He looks like my grandfather in this shot!). I did however tell them all he had to do was quote Shakespeare at me and I still ended up in a puddle of goo!
Slide 5
Then I also told them about my TV appearances and radio appearances ... I was going to show them some of the 'Making of' Mythmakers DVD we did at Betchworth/Gatton but the DVD refused to be either ripped (it crashed Orac the Mac) and wouldn't even play on Jolinar so I gave up. I HAD however successfully edited the BBC radio programme and was able to play some of that to them. Andreas then chipped in with the fact that fans are the repository of knowledge, and I said yes, that is what we do, we keep it alive, and you can't expect an actor to remember everything he has done, after 200 episodes in some shows or especially 30 years later in others! We also can translate hieroglyphs and Egyptian unlike some of the actors, but I did point out that was an outside-of-fandom activity which had been transferred in.
I also told them how is possible for fans to put pressure on the creators/producers and cited the Roj Blake/Daniel Jackson difference 20 years produced. I am SURE Gareth would have stayed put in B7 if he had had our pressure as the fans from Stargate used theirs (and the internet to do it over) when he wanted to shake things up a bit at the end of Series Two of B7. Michael Shanks from SG1 got to direct and write episodes and got shifted in the Opening Credits when he came back ... Paul McGillion (spelling magnavox_23?) from Atlantis got Carson Beckett back after the fans picketed the studios when TPTB killed him off for no real reason. WE ARE THE ONES WITH POWER IN THIS AND ARE NOT JUST PASSIVE CONSUMERS - thank goodness for the internet.
Slide 6
So what do the people involved get in all this and our involvement? We publicise their shows (to other fans in other fandoms and people who are not in any at all), keep stuff in the public view after a show ends, buy the merchandise ... We continue to follow actors after the shows have ended or moved on. This can also be used to the producers' advantages - I cited Claudia Black and Ben Browder being brought from Farscape to SG1 and how Jewel Staite was brought over on their whim from Firefly to Atlantis... mutter mutter ... The less said on that the better actually ... We go to conventions and the actors, directors etc. can get money for doing that ...
Slide 7
This was about my personal theories about why fans find these shows so interesting. I talked about how in today's secularised society perhaps he have lost touch with the stories we have told ourselves for millennia. I introduced Joseph Campbell, waved around a copy of The Power of Myth and talked about his book on the monomyth the Hero with a Thousand Faces. I explained how Christopher Vogler turned that into an 8 page memo for Disney on how to write a screenplay. It is now the book The Writers Journey. I also told them how Geoge Lucas used these ideas when writing Star Wars.
Slide 8
I then talked about what the fans get out of it - something to be enthusiastic about (I was sure this was genetic, my father is a train fan and can understand 'enthusiasts' corner' but my mother and sister can't) and fellow fans in a community to share their interests with. We get a creative and fannish outlet. I said I have always written stuff, its nice to have something to write about. I also said it can be therapy. Should I need to work something through I can borrow a character who is going through similar mental things and put them in a story and get them to do my emotions and working out by proxy. I have spoken to therapists and psychologists and they got very exited about people doing that. I also (without names) mentioned parvateal. After what you have gone through, my dear we need a fan fiction on what it felt like to be Daniel in Continuum ...
Slide 9
Here I quoted two quotes - one Andreas had given me :-
Films about the future might seem to be the most aloof from contemporary
social problems. Yet they frequently are characterised by radical positions
that are too extreme for Hollywood realism. In some respects, the genre that
seems most distant from the contemporary world is the one most free to
exercise accurate descriptions of its operations” (Michael Ryan and Douglas
Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary
Hollywood Film, p. 254).
and one I took from the transcript of Stargate SG1 200 ...
Science fiction is an existential metaphor. It allows us to tell stories about the
human condition. Isaac Asimov once said: "Individual science fiction stories
may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today,
but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our
salvation, if we are to be saved at all.“
• (‘Grell’, Stargate SG1, Episode10x6: ‘200’)
That made Andreas suggest I should come back to talk about Science Fiction and talking about how it is relevant to society. How classic StarTrek showed the first interracial kiss in 1968 and how they had the first female, black character as part of their command structure. How their communicators and data blocks became mobile phones and floppy discs. How in one of the movies (help me out here please) Kirk is seen climbing up Mount Rushmore and (how relevant this is now) in that depiction of the future along with the other presidents there was a black face amongst them ...
I rest my case ... but I may have to do something on SciFi for after Half Term (eek!).