The Telegraph

When deciding on papers to use for this project we thought we should use the last remaining broadsheet, as they were once a very tradition British icon.

BBC Ticker

The Daily Express

We used this paper, as it is a middle of the road conservative paper, and it has very strong political right wing message against immigration and other foreign policies, and are used to running fear tactics in their stories.

'Key scratch artist' admits hoax

An artist who claimed to have vandalised nearly 50 cars in the name of art has admitted it was a stunt.
Mark McGowan, 37, said he had taken pictures of himself scratching vehicles' paintwork as part of a project.

But the London performance artist has since admitted the cars were already "keyed" and the photos were "staged".

He said it had been an art project that had gone "horribly wrong" and said he was "very, very sorry".

"I never keyed any cars...the whole thing has just been a nightmare," he added.


At least I've shown people do care about car crime
Mark McGowan
"All I wanted to do was highlight the plight of people who have had their cars scratched, which has somehow spiralled out of control.

"My family and friends have shunned me and someone rang into a radio show and said they wanted to rip my head off.

"But at least I've shown people do care about car crime."

Mr McGowan said the cars in two of the pictures, taken for his latest exhibition, belonged to his brother-in-law and a barmaid from a pub in Camberwell, south London, and had already been scratched.

The Met police had said on Monday that if any criminal allegations were made they would be investigated.

Mr McGowan's latest project is just one of many bizarre stunts by the artist who describes himself as "the British alternative to David Blaine".

In 2003, he used his nose to push a monkey nut seven miles to 10 Downing Street in protest against student debt.

He also rolled on pavements for four miles across London singing Christmas carols to highlight the work of office cleaners.

Rolling news24 creation

The News 24 layout is a well known news format and so we decided to use the logo and scrolling update in our project. In order to create this, we had to use photoshop to separate each logo part- this is to create the layers for Flash which is important in order to let the text flow infront of and behind other layers.







Using the cloning stamp, we got rid of the time that was on the screen shot from the internet, and cut each section up before inporting them into the Flash library.

In Flash we then positioned each segment correctly on the page, and typed the text which we wanted to scroll along the bottom of the page, and created it into a motion tween to it would end up the opposite side of the screen it started from.

We decided we wanted a clock which actually worked, so had to search the internet to find action script instructions.

The news section works really well and looks more realistic than the first BBC one we created.



Also, we are really pleased we decided to use the real time clock as it makes it look more professional and gives a sense of living in the present- making the event seem like it really has just happened

Aliza Shvarts

The internationally reported art project of a Yale University art major who said she would document a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs, has been revealed as a hoax.

Yale released a statement today indicating that senior student Aliza Shvarts "stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages." The statement added, "The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body." Yale defended Shvarts' project stating, "She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art," but added, "Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns."

According to a report in the Yale University newspaper, the Yale Daily News, Shvarts was to commence a display of her senior art project Tuesday which reportedly featured her artificial inseminations and drug induced abortions.

"Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process," said the paper. "The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body."

"I hope it inspires some sort of discourse," Shvarts told the paper. "Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it's not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone."

The paper suggested that some students did disagree with the 'art,' but Shvarts also was able to find other enthusiasts. Art major Juan Castillo told the paper "I really loved the idea of this project, but a lot other people didn't. I think that most people were very resistant to thinking about what the project was really about."

For her part, Shvarts indicated that her education in 'art' at Yale has taught her that her project is appropriate. "I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity," Shvarts told the Daily Yale. "I think that I'm creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be."

The story seemed believable coming from Yale, since the university has a history of unquestioning abortion support.

In 2006, the university announced that ob/gyn residents at Yale's School of Medicine must undergo training in abortion procedures in a required residency program established by Planned Parenthood's Connecticut branch (PPC). In 2007, the university observed "Roe v. Wade" week in which pro-abortion campus clubs taught students how to commit the "simple procedure" of abortion - a procedure made complicated and "emotionally traumatic" by "media attention."

The Guardian

The guardian is the main middleclass paper in the UK and is mainly read by Labour and liberal democrat supporters alike, and is printed in full colour the only other British daily to do the same is the Daily Mail.

Fake Bomb at the Royal Ontario Museum

A 24-year-old Ontario College of Art and Design student who planted a fake bomb at the Royal Ontario Museum for an art project has been released on $33,000 bail.

Thorarinn Jonsson turned himself in to police last night and was charged with common nuisance and mischief that interferes with property. He spent the night in custody and appeared at Old City Hall this morning.

The bomb hoax forced the evacuation of the ROM, and canceled a major fundraiser for the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research Wednesday night.

Mr. Jonsson said he left the fake pipe bomb, which he described as a sculpture, in a bag at the ROM around 4 p.m. on Wednesday, with a note indicating that it was not a bomb. Then went to his third year production class to present a video he made called “The fake bombing at the ROM”. The short video depicted a woman walking through the museum, before an apparent explosion. Mr. Jonsson posted the video on YouTube. He has said that his project was meant to demonstrate “recontextualization” - the notion that the context in which an item is placed changes its meaning.

“We see it as an individual who planted this device in a museum, in a public place, and it impacted on a lot of police resources and members of the public,” Detective Leslie Dunkley, who investigated the case, told reporters today. “It is a big deal."

OCAD has suspended Mr. Jonsson and his production class teachers pending an internal investigation. OCAD president Sara Diamond said the teachers had no idea that the class project involved planting something at the ROM. She said the student “crossed the line”

Friends who attended court to support Mr. Jonsson denounced the “witch hunt” that has followed him.
“It’s art because it makes us think,” said Daniel Epstein, a U of T student. He said his friend was not trying to deliberately shut down the AIDS benefit. In media interviews, Mr. Jonsson has regretted ruining the AIDS fundraisers, but said he did not know it was to be held. He did not blame himself for the fallout.

Banksy

Fake prehistoric rock art of a caveman with a shopping trolley has been hung on the walls of the British Museum.
The rock was put there by art prankster Banksy, who has previously put works in galleries in London and New York.

A British Museum spokeswoman said they were "seeing the lighter side of it". She said it went unnoticed for one or two days but Banksy said three days.

Banksy also hung a sign saying the cave art showed "early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds".

It read: "This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era.


It looked very much in keeping with the other exhibits, the explanatory text was quite similar
British Museum spokeswoman
"The artist responsible is known to have created a substantial body of work across South East of England under the moniker Banksymus Maximus but little else is known about him.

"Most art of this type has unfortunately not survived. The majority is destroyed by zealous municipal officials who fail to recognise the artistic merit and historical value of daubing on walls."

Banksy is best-known as a graffiti artist who has attracted a cult following for stencilled designs that satirise authority and modern society.

He hung his own art in the Tate Britain in London in October 2003, which was not noticed until it fell to the ground, and has done the same in four New York galleries.


Banksy has previously stuck a painting to the wall of Tate Britain
The British Museum praised the way his rock was hung and the style of the sign, which was "very similar" to their own design.

A spokesperson for Banksy said he sneaked the work into the museum on Monday and it was found on Wednesday.

He ran a competition on his website for fans to have their photographs taken with the rock, offering a shopping trolley as a prize.

A British Museum spokeswoman said: "We're reasonably confident that it hadn't been up for that long, maybe a couple of days.


We have loaned the rock to Banksy but we are still in the process of deciding what to do with it
British Museum spokeswoman
"It looked very much in keeping with the other exhibits, the explanatory text was quite similar."

It is now being exhibited at Banksy's new show, Outside Institute, which opens in London on Friday. It will have a sign saying it is "on loan from the British Museum".

The British Museum spokesperson said they were expecting it back when Outside Institute ends in June.

"He has said to us that we can keep it," she said.

Bowie and Boyd "hoax" art world

Some of the biggest names in the art world have reportedly been fooled by a biography of a fake artist created by the author William Boyd and the rock star David Bowie.
Last week the glitterati of New York gathered for a launch party of Boyd's biography of the apparently rediscovered American painter Nat Tate.

Bowie, a director of 21 Publishing, the company which produced the book, read extracts to the gathering.

Critics on the other side of the Atlantic were due to attend the British launch of the memoir on Tuesday. Several British papers, including the Sunday Telegraph, have already run extracts from the book.

Excerpts were also published on Bowie's own website.

Fake history

However, the Independent newspaper says Tate and the story of how he befriended painters Picasso and Braque, suffered from depression, burned most of his paintings and then killed himself aged 31, is all fiction.

Some of the paintings pictured in the book were reportedly by Boyd himself. Photos of Tate were from Boyd's own collection of pictures of unidentified people.

The ruse was made more convincing by an endorsement on the book's dust cover from the veteran writer and political commentator Gore Vidal.

In the book he is also quoted as remembering Tate as "essentially dignified, drunk with nothing to say".

John Richardson, the acclaimed biographer of the artist Pablo Picasso, was also in on the scam and is also quoted.

Karen Wright, one of Bowie's co-directors at 21 Publishing said the hoax was not meant to be malicious.

"Part of it was, we were very amused that people kept saying 'Yes, I've heard of him'. There is a willingness not to appear foolish. Critics are too proud for that."

presentation

Filming Planes

Filming Planes
To gain footage of airplanes flying. We went out and shoot several different planes flying over central London, it was important that we gained footage of the planes in as many different weather conditions, so that we could match up the footage to previously recorded images of the gherkin Tower.
The footage had to have an amateur feel about it, so getting the camera to shake the right amount as if it had been recorded on a hand held camera was not something that you can judge at the time of filming as it will not be till the editing process that you see how the two clips piece together.
Examples of films that have used the same camera technique are Cloverfield and Blair witch project. We found the footage shot to be hard to edit, and needed manipulated a lot, so that the two run seamlessly together.

The Sun

The Sun newspaper has the highest readership than any other paper in Britain standing at 3,126,866 copies sold daily. The Murdock news corporation also owns The Sun. The paper has a reputation for racist and homophobic views, alongside the image of the white van man.

Change of Title

At the stage that we produced the poster our title was “Panic in an Illusion” this was always a working title. We started to feel that this did not represent the way that our project was heading, so we opted for a new title this being “Inside London”. The main reason for the new title was that we had created an online TV channel of the same name. The new channel was a mock-up of a news program so we felt that the name represented this.

Fear in the Media

Be afraid; be very afraid. After all, isn't fear the strongest emotion we have? If you were a reporter who wanted to get the best ratings, wouldn't you use the most powerful tool in the human experience? It works, is why they do it. If we didn't react to negative and scary news so powerfully and predictably, they wouldn't use it; but we do because we are human.

Do you remember the pandemic? Bird flu was coming to get us. Why? Because it was the scariest thing they could report in that boring news cycle. As soon as there was something else to scare us, the media forgot about bird flu. The potential for avian flu to transform into a pandemic hasn't changed, but we got tired of being afraid of bird flu, so we went onto other fears, the war, the terrorist threat, the collapsing bridge. We all drive across bridges, so now we are all focused on making our bridges safer, not developing a vaccination to prevent the spread of avian flu.


Imagine, we re-elected a president we all knew was incompetent, simply out of fear. We were afraid to vote in another leader in a time of war. The known fear is always preferable to the unknown fear. We voted, saying, "This fear, this president, and this war we can live with," because we knew that fear. Had we voted, "I don't know what the other will be but I don't fear it as much as this one," we would have had a change in direction. Here, I won't make any predictions if that would have been good or bad, but it would have been different.

Fear can be highly motivating, or paralyzing, depending on how we react to our fears. The media is great at helping us decide what to fear, but not so good at helping us know how we should respond to it. There are too many "experts," who disagree about what to do, but they all agree we should be very afraid.

How can we, the people, the readers and watchers of our world, deal with the media and the fears they provoke? Similar to how we manage our fears in life, I would think. We know that life is scary, and we manage to ignore, or deal with those fears, usually, not well for some and better for others. Humankind needs to be scared; that's why we have scary movies and Stephen King. But, that's not enough; we also have Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to further scare us.

Why does the media scare us? Because it works. How we can react to it positively, is to not let them manipulate us, through our fears, but from our own experiences and thought processes, much like we do the real things to fear in our lives. We know that we can be seriously injured or killed in a car, but we drive. We know the news is scary, but we watch it and react to it, some positively and others negatively; it's our choice.

The other choice is to deny that there are things to know and some to fear, which requires some response, or to be ignorant of what is occurring in the world, and not care. I choose to sort and filter the news, not ignore it. You can choose for yourself.

Online television streaming

Web Streaming:

As mentioned earlier in the blog we are extremely interested in utilising the internet within our project. A possibility that we are keen to use is the innovative notion of internet television. New media technology now enables us to create our own Internet TV station. This will allow us to broadcast live from anywhere with an internet connection, with as little as an 8 second delay. Internet television is a great example of convergent media in everyday life, which will add another exciting level to our project.

Following the setup of our own television channel and testing the possibilities of it, we are confident that we will use it in the final presentation of the project. As the project is highlighting how the public receive the media, we feel that it would be extremely interesting for our audience to watch a live audience, consequently experiencing the piece for themselves as well as experiencing the reactions of others.

Reuters Doctoring Photos from Beirut?

The news agency Reuters has withdrawn from sale 920 pictures taken by a photographer after finding he had doctored two images taken in Lebanon.
Bloggers first spotted that smoke on Adnan Hajj's image of the aftermath of an Israeli air strike in Beirut appeared to have been made darker.

A Reuters investigation confirmed this and also found two flares had been added to an image of an Israeli jet.

Mr Hajj told the BBC he denied doctoring the content of the images.



Adnan Hajj's doctored image following an Israeli air strike


He said had tried to clean dust off the first image, a shot of buildings in a suburb of Beirut, on which Reuters found smoke plumes had been darkened and expanded using computer software.

"It was so badly done - an amateur could have done better," Bob Bodman, picture editor at the Daily Telegraph newspaper, told the BBC.

Mr Hajj, a freelance photographer working for Reuters, denied altering the second photograph, an image of an Israeli F-16 fighter over Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon.

"There's no problem with it, not at all," he said in a BBC interview.

'Lapse'

Paul Holmes, editor of political and general news at Reuters, told the BBC that senior photographers at the agency "weren't convinced" that cleaning dust off the first image would result in the manipulation the image showed.

He said there had been a "lapse in our editing process", but stressed that Reuters had moved swiftly to address the issue and tighten editing procedures.


Global picture editor Tom Szlukovenyi said all of Adnan Hajj's images had been removed from the company's database.

He described it as a precautionary measure, but said the manipulation undermined trust in Mr Hajj's entire body of work.

"There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image," Mr Szlukovenyi said in a statement.

Questions were raised about the accuracy of the image on Sunday in several weblogs - personal online diaries by writers known as "bloggers" - including ones which scrutinise media coverage of the Middle East for bias.

Mr Holmes said Reuters welcomed the growth of weblogs, which had made the media "much more accountable and more transparent".

The London Paper

Rupert Murdoch owns the London paper along side the Sun and the Times,
We picked this paper, as it is a free daily paper handed out to customers outside London underground stations at rush hour, from Monday to Friday.
Our reasoning behind this was that if a plane had crashed into a landmark in central London they would be one of the first newspapers to run the story.

Consent Form example

A consent form will be obligatory after filming the general public and their reactions, and will only be able to use the footage of the particular individuals if they agree and sign the form, which will be similar to this one here.

UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER
Information and Consent Form
Title of the Study: CONVERGENT MEDIA
Principal Investigator: Neal Bryant, James Ketterer, Andrew Lawson (phone: 0208 208 2747) (email: iamlawson@gmail.com)
Student Researcher: Andrew Lawson (phone: 07895505758)
DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH
You are invited to participate in a research study about a University Of Westminster student project looking at the important of the media in the modern times.
You have been asked to participate because You have just been shown a piece of film that has been doctored to show a terrorist attack in central London, all images have been manipulated to rein-acted what might be televised if such events might happen.
The purpose of the research is to understand the publics understanding of how the new media works.
This study will include randomly selected members of the public.
The information will be included in a university project.
You will be audio and video taped during your participation in this research.
WHAT WILL MY PARTICIPATION INVOLVE?
If you decide to participate in this research you will be asked to discuss you feeling on viewing this piece of footage.
Your participation will last approximately 5 mins per session and will require 1 session which will require 5 mins in total.
ARE THERE ANY RISKS TO ME?
We don't anticipate any risks to you from participation in this study.
ARE THERE ANY BENEFITS TO ME?
We don't expect any direct benefits to you from participation in this study.
HOW WILL MY CONFIDENTIALITY BE PROTECTED?
This study is anonymous. Neither your name nor any other identifiable information will be recorded.
WHOM SHOULD I CONTACT IF I HAVE QUESTIONS?
You may ask any questions about this project at any time. If you have questions about the project after you leave today you should contact the Principal Investigator Neal Bryant, James Ketterer, Andrew Lawson at 0208 208 2747. You may also call the student researcher, Andrew Lawson at 07895505758.
If you are not satisfied with response of research team, have more questions, or want to talk with someone about your rights as a project participant, you should contact the University Of Westminster on +44 (0)20 7911 5000
Your participation is completely voluntary. If you decide not to participate or to withdraw from the study it will have no effect on any services or treatment you are currently receiving.
Your signature indicates that you have read this consent form, had an opportunity to ask any questions about your participation in this research and voluntarily consent to participate. You will receive a copy of this form for your records.
Name of Participant (please print):______________________________
_______________________________________ ______________
Signature Date

Rolling News Channel

The rolling news format has been a very popular with the news broadcasters, as it allows the channel to repeat the same footage every ten to twenty minutes, this keeping the costs down. It has also been popular with the TV audience as it allows them to catch up with daily events in a short space of time.
It was always our intention to use the BBC 24 style layout to show the Gherkin tower footage, we belive that the BBC logo will help the viewer to be more trusting of the film they are being shown.
This style will benefit us in the way that we will be using a very short piece of footage, and we will be able to loop the film and this will not look out of place on the rolling news channel