Science Fiction and a bit of extra semiotics

Bill began talking about semiotics and photography which he hadn't managed to finish from last week....

Basically he told us Ivan lied to us....or didnt tell us everything :) that infact there aren't two types but THREE!

1. Symbol - arbitary - linguistic
2. Icon - a likeness or resemblance
3. Index - existentially linked e.g where there is smoke there is fire

He informed us of the 'father figure' of cinema Andre Bazan (sp?) and that the first full length feature film was made in America and was about Ned Kelly. Learn something new everyday :)

Theeen a bit on photography that analogue has been replaced by digital, is this a good or a bad thing? Kind of interesting to think about.

I see the point that because of digital and that we can take as many photos as we want and manipulate any that go wrong there can be as a result not much heart and thought put into taking photographs anymore and has resulted in some of the silly photographic images of today. (but some of these can be funny I'm not complaining =D)

On the other hand digital manipulation has also allowed some gorgeous images aswell with the manipulation further enhancing the photo and photographers that still take into consideration composition, lighting etc.

My favourite photographer at the moment would have to be Elena Kalis
http://www.elenakalisphoto.com/

Although she largely does water images they are all beautiful and display soft movements of water.

After these statements were made he moved onto 'Science fiction'....kind of. He seemed to more talk about genre in general than science fiction.

A good point he made was that movies are never one specific genre anymore, they have multiple genres. The example of men in black was used that it is not only science fiction but also comedy.

Stephen Neale - difference is absolutely essential to the economy of genre.

He spoke about how it is not really possible to trace a definate path of a history of a particular genre you can only follow one route and discover patterns. A fair statement as there are millions of movies created now it is impossible all with different inspirations and creators that have worked on them.

The last fact I got from the lecture was about the popular theme of sci-fi. The idea of humans serving computers aswell as special effects, futuristic environments and controlled worlds. This seems to be true however I am not a science fiction movie fan myself(I often get told off for having not seen Star Trek or Star Wars :) ) so I wouldnt really know and probably didnt connect with the ideas of this lecture as much as a result.