Report Post 3 - Audio Visual Information

As well as Biographical information I felt that I should find a few pieces of AV information. Specifically I wanted to find some images of M. Night Shyamalan and perhaps a video, preferably of an interview, something that expressed his thoughts. In this post I detail my finding and talk about their sources.

Because I'm not that experienced with using this blog yet, I can't simply post the pictures here for you to view, so instead I will link to them and hope that you will be able to see the pictures by clicking the links. I'll do the same with the videos, as I'm also not experienced with embedding.

Here are some pictures of M. Night Shyamalan that I found on Flickr.

Picture 1 - At a movie premier.

Picture 2 - Also at a premier.

Picture 3 - Taken while filming The Happening.

Here also are some videos that I have found; much to my delight, I found a few interviews. Although I did and still do have some concerns using videos from YouTube, especially with the interviews.

Interview Clip 1 - A rather long interview with M. Night. I was hesitant to include this, as it was recorded off of the The Sixth Sense DVD. From YouTube.

Interview Clip 2 - A short clip from IBNLive; filmed close to the release of The Happening, this clip talks briefly about paranormal themes in M. Night's films.

Advertisement - This is an advertisement for American Express that M. Night made. I think personally it is a good representation of what his movies are often like. It's not immediately clear what is happening and it takes you until the end to find out. It also features M. Night as a character. Much like Alfred Hitchcock (who M. Night apparently admires), M. Night often makes appearances in his own movies. The biggest part he has played so far, was as a young writer whose works would change the world in The Lady in the Water. This video is from Google Videos.

Clip 3 - This is a teaser trailer for M. Night's upcoming movie The Last Airbender, from YouTube. I also found an interview with M. Night and the creators of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (warning, the interview is quite long).

Interview - While this is unfortunately not a clip, it is a transcription of an interview from Sci-fi Online.

My very first search for pictures of my topic was done using Google image search and I found many. But I decided that searching for pictures of my topic would be best done using a dedicated picture database, because Google images, while it may yield a great deal of results from many different places, the results are difficult to filter and evaluate. The picture database Flickr became quite useful for me, as I was able to do a tag search for M. Night Shyamalan and find many results; not just pictures of M. Night but also pictures of actors that have been in his movies and photo captures from his movies.

Searching for videos was a bit harder than I originally thought it would be. The first place I went was YouTube, as it seems that almost anything can be found on YouTube. However, despite fruitful findings I was hit with a small realisation. I could not use most of what I had found, because the majority of the videos that I found had been recorded off of DVDs and television shows and then uploaded to YouTube later. While it is true that many people use YouTube to host their own work, including some celebrities, many more people upload videos that they have taken without permission. In the end, I have provided links to two of the interviews that I looked at. I did this against my better judgement. If I were more educated on the situation of copyright in this instance, then the amount of videos shown here might have been different. The next time I do a research project I will have to read up on copyright laws.