Monday, October 24, 2016

Webspinna Battle

Mac Vs. PC

For our Webspinna Battle, we decided to focus on a debate that seems to be pretty prevalent between college students: Mac vs. PC. Just like our reading in The Ecstasy of Influence, A Plagiarism, we not only didn’t avoid drawing upon those that have gone before us but in fact specifically sought out how other people have approached this topic. While some may see this as plagiarism, we wanted to have our characters and artistic choices recognizable so as to be able to build upon pre-established expectations.

The main source of inspiration for our battle was the series of Mac vs. PC commercials that Apple released several years ago. In these, a chubbier man in a white shirt and tie represented PC while a simple, casual dressed man was Mac. These commercials made PC seem like a hopeless cross between businessman and nerd, just trying to win customers while Mac was chill and approachable. Drawing from this, we wanted to do something similar but something that would give a more balanced view of the two. So, we decided to emphasize how PC seems to be more popular with businesses and is often seen as more “traditional” while Mac is much more trendy and popular with students. We demonstrated this in both dress and audio.

While we wanted the main source of the “arguments" to come from the audio, we realized it would be important to quickly and clearly establish what our personas were. So to begin we used the start-up sounds for both the Mac (Brittany) and PC (Brendan). Brendan wore a suit to emphasize the classic-but-old-fashioned idea and Brittany dressed up in a slightly preppy but more modern nice-casual outfit. When Brendan turned around during the PC’s start-up sound, he revealed a Windows logo on his back, solidifying his persona visually and through audio simultaneously. During the PC’s next audio clip, “And loading,” the Mac booted up and immediately started playing “Better Faster Stronger” by Daft Punk, alluding to the Mac’s faster start-up speed. During that time, Brittany started dancing, turning around to reveal the Apple logo on her back.  PC finally got his music going, playing the song “Classic”, when Mac interrupted with the song “Fancy”, arguing that while the PC is timeless, the Mac is “in the fast lane” (and perhaps a bit of a fad, as Brittany hopefully alluded to by taking a selfie). Next, the PC began a clip from Legally Blonde the Musical called “Serious”, in which he suggested that while a PC is the choice of computer for a professional, a Mac is just flashy; a bit of a Marilyn Monroe. PC also took a bite of Mac’s apple out of spite. The Mac responded with “Livin’ in the 21st Century” by Kanye West, emphasizing the Mac’s popularity and modernity. She then took her apple back and compared it to the logo on her screen, suggesting that whatever the PC does, the Mac will always find a way to compete. PC responded with “Better Than Me”  and stole Kate (Brendan’s fiancĂ©e and Brittany’s roommate) from the audience to do the cha-cha to emphasize just how awesome traditional can be, even if the Mac thinks it’s better. Her fall was an accident, but one could argue it actually highlights the nature of computer error. As the PC grabbed a Windows hourglass-shaped battle ax, the Mac started playing a remix of Windows error noises (found on Youtube). The Mac, wielding a rainbow pinwheel of death error icon, was about to triumph when the PC started playing the Mac funk noise, and both of us started moving in jerky slow-motion as we  “froze”, finishing off with a power-down noise. So who ultimately won? We both channeled some of the typical pros and cons of each computer through audio and visual resources, but we’ll let you decide.

Links to the Audio:

https://youtu.be/GDpmVUEjagg?t=1m37s - Harder Better Faster Stronger
https://youtu.be/CW0DUg63lqU?t=18s - Shameless about stealing

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