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I'm Lauren Rae Orsini, a graduate student, journalist, infographic designer, anime convention reporter, and documentarian. Welcome.
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22 February 2010

A special announcement

Filed Under Achievement Unlocked | 2 Comments

I am proud to announce that I have accepted the position of Official Documentarian for Inochicon 2010!

Inochicon is an anime and gaming convention in downtown Philadelphia. The first ever Inochicon will take place this August. Earlier in the month, the organizers invited me to attend as a documentarian, blogger, and speaker, and I have recently agreed. I thought my readers should be the first to know!

What exactly will I be doing? You’ll have to come to know for sure, but I’ll be doing my usual thing, running around the convention with a video camera and a laptop, interviewing guests, staff, and speakers. I’ll also be presenting my own panel titled, “Filming Anime Conventions for Beginners,” for people who want to learn how to do this, too.

It’s an honor to be given the opportunity to do what I love and I thank you, Inochicon! I’ll be posting updates about the convention as I hear them, but you can also check their twitter and Facebook. Hope to see some of you there!

19 February 2010

Movie Night: Otaku Unite!

Filed Under Anime and Fandom, Documentary and Film | 8 Comments

Here’s something you wouldn’t expect from a documentary with an exclamation point at the end of the title: a dull movie.

Last night I watched Otaku Unite! (Eric Bresler, 2004), a movie that works great on paper. With a well researched premise encompassing dozens of conventions, archived footage of early anime events and shows, interviews with prominent anime scholars, the director of Robotech, and voice actors for shows spanning from Akira to Speed Racer, how could it possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, this movie seems to sap away the the lively personalities and colorful characters that populate anime fandom and leave us with a lecture.

As smart as this guy was, he didn’t register as a personality. This film needed more characters.

It isn’t all bad. By making the rise of anime in America sound like a history lesson, it rejects the idea that otaku are somehow unusual and normalizes the fandom as just another cultural movement. But how could a documentary with everything it needs to succeed end up boring?

The first thing that appears in the film is a parody of a rating screen: “Rated O for otaku of all ages.” Based on this, I wrongly assumed that the documentary was designed for a niche audience of self-identified anime fans. However, much of the movie went into defining the nuances of anime is for the benefit of outsiders.

It’s interesting to see how Otaku Unite! defines “otaku.” (Remember how Manga Mad did it?)

Much of the movie is static interviews with the same experts. While they have a lot of great information about how anime in America came to be, we never get to know them or care about them at all (one sad attempt was to show how the Akira voice actor deeply.. appreciated Hooters restaurants). There is no plot to the movie, no change, no story being told. (There wasn’t even much uniting- it seemed that the title should have been: Otaku Already United!) I learned a lot about the history of otaku fandom that I didn’t know, but at the end I still felt like I wasted seventy-five minutes.

Correction by Tom S. – Katsucon 2004 made a cameo.

I’ve heard incredible things about this movie and I’m sure a lot of you are going to disagree with my review (most notably Lawrence Eng, whose name is on the credit roll!) I WISH I liked this movie more, because it was so darn well researched. If only well done equaled not boring.

Lauren’s Rating (out of five stars)

Cinematography: ★★★

Content: ★★

You can watch Otaku Unite! on Netflix like I did, or watch right now at The Anime Network.

17 February 2010

Always have a Plan B

Filed Under Documentary and Film | 3 Comments

The bad news: I will not be producing a maid cafe documentary.

The good news: I will still be writing a maid cafe story.

The camera I unwittingly used. Photo from archivist David Mattinson.

What happened: Sometimes you can do everything right, but still lose your footage. I’ve spent the last couple days trying to capture my video to no avail. When I checked the original tapes, they were corrupted for reasons nobody at my school’s camera rental or media center can determine. Despite the photo, I’m not even sure it’s an issue with the camera, which has since worked fine. Also, even the worst camera is designed to warn you when it is ruining your tapes, and we never received an error message.

But here’s the fact: the footage is too buggy, noisy, and pixelated to use. It’s the worst case scenario for any filmmaker. But I have an ace up my sleeve- I am also a traditional journalist.

So the new plan is for a print story, using all my powers of description and the choicest quotes from my interviews. (Even though the sound is unusable, it is still comprehensible enough for me to find quotes.) I will use the least choppy of my video stills to illustrate the story, and take the 15 minutes of usable footage I have to put together an audio or video clip to fit.

The lesson here is that there’s always a way to get the story, even when things go wrong. As much as modern journalism relies on technology, when it comes down to it, people make the stories, not the camera.

15 February 2010

Thanks Jezebel!

Filed Under Achievement Unlocked | 1 Comment

My goodness, when Latoya Peterson came to write an article about the maid cafe for Jezebel, I didn’t realize she would link me in it: welcome, new readers!

The article has given me some great ideas about how to shape my maid cafe documentary. I originally wanted to write just about the junction between cultures, or just transformation through costume, or just sexuality and feminism (or the lack of). But Latoya’s article proves that all of these things are at work.

In case anyone is wondering- I do like my portrayal in the piece. In the video, you can see all the emotions I was feeling about the maid cafe. I walked into the event thinking that the Washington Post article was completely wrong and I would prove that, but by Saturday night I was realizing that the cafe was more of a gray area than I ever imagined. Now that I realize it’s not just black and white, I can create a more accurate documentary- I no longer feel I have a score to settle.

I stand by everything I said in the piece and my one regret is that Latoya didn’t mention that I also spoke about the “Weird Japan” article, which I have also blogged about. I hope the article gives everyone insight about the how and why of the maid cafe. And Dan Zak, if you’re reading, I’d love to chat!

15 February 2010

Katsucon 16 in review

Filed Under Anime Conventions | 2 Comments

Happy Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year, readers! Photo by John B.

I’m back from Katsucon 16 and can testify that I’ve had quite an adventure. Here’s a recap of my experiences:

Maid Cafe

This was a lot more work than I’d bargained for! I’ve barely ever waitressed before, so going from zero experience to waiting three tables at once was a real challenge. I’ll be sure to tip more generously from now on at restaurants. (My own tips for this weekend, of course, went to Relay for Life with the rest of the maid cafe proceeds.)

Wearing a uniform made things easier because there was no guesswork in the morning about what I needed to wear. It also made me instantly recognizable as an official maid and staff member, allowing me access all over the convention. Despite the perks though, I will not be working through Katsucon again- I’d rather spend the extra money to get in and then use my time to explore and enjoy the con.

Filming

The hardest part of filming was getting my cameraman, Alex Thompson, to the convention in the first place! Since the Gaylord hotel is so far from the metro station (and said station, for some reason, wasn’t showing up on my GPS,) he had to take a taxi to get there. After that, things went very smoothly. In a little under four hours, we got seven full interviews with maids and guests and more than thirty minutes of B-roll. Thanks to everyone who agreed to an interview with me!

Since I was still waitressing in between interviews, Alex’s help was invaluable to me. With his experience working for an Ohio TV station (where he’s from) and more recently, a Frontline documentary, his assistance will ensure that the picture and sound on this project will surpass my last one by leaps and bounds.

Meetups

Luckily, between my cafe work and the project, I wasn’t too busy to meet new people and connect with old friends. I chatted with almost every one of the stars from my last three-part documentary, and was glad to find out they enjoyed the film as much as I did. I also met up with some of my twitter followers, most notably Tom S., a loyal commenter on this blog.

As for new people, I was happy to make the acquaintance of the voices behind Coswatch (one of whom, as it turned out, I had already met last time I was conducting interviews). I hope to see you guys again when I’m less drained from working so we can carry on a more intelligent conversation!

And believe it or not, I myself was also interviewed at the convention. Turns out Latoya Peterson, a reporter for Jezebel and the founder of Racialicious, had the same idea that I had. Like me, she was reporting on issues of feminism and sexuality at the maid cafe. I’m so glad she gave me a chance to talk about the issue that has been under my skin for a year now. She also offered me some sound career advice, which was wonderful to receive from a person doing everything I hope to accomplish someday.

In summary, this was my most hectic convention yet. It was pretty stressful, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Now that it’s over, I have the footage I needed and can’t wait to show you what I create with it.

9 February 2010

An interview with Danny Ledonne, part III

Filed Under Interviews, Journalism, Video Games | 1 Comment

This is the third installation of my interview with filmmaker Danny Ledonne, which I have published here in three parts. In this section, Ledonne and I discuss the upcoming video game, Heavy Rain, violence in video games and how the media reports violent crimes.

Q: Heavy Rain, have you heard of it? It’s being touted as the first of its kind- an artistic documentary, an interactive drama. I wanted to ask you what you think about it.

A: What I can say is that concept is not entirely new but that concept has never really been accepted commercially and so I think what many game designers I’ve talked to have said is, “Look, we’re going to have the tools at our disposal to make video game that you could think of more as art games that aren’t using the conventional commercial assumptions about video games being fun and entertaining and fast paced and easy to understand and comfortable to play,” but those games are really up against an entire demographic that has been carved out by the video game industry to not accept games like that. Here’s the bottom line- when video games came out, they were installed in saloons and bars and pubs and places like that and adults would go and put quarters in these games while they were having fun at a pub and I think video game publishers and developers said, “Well, if we’re going to expand this market, we need to get the video game into the American family’s home, we need a way to make a video game seem commercially palatable to a broader audience.” And so systems like the Atari and especially the Nintendo in 1985 capitalized on creating fun family entertainment and it shows everyone in the family sitting around a TV having fun, it’s usually the girls watching, the boys playing, video games. But what has happened in the last ten years is that video games have begun to become much more sophisticated, they’re going to have more mature audiences. But video game makers still present it as the whole family huddled around the video game, as they would play Operation or Scrabble or something like that. So until that mindset changes, you’re going to have some really incredible artistic video games that a very small segment of people who read the New York Times and go to art museums are actually going to play, and most video gamers are going to go on message boards and forums and say, “LOL this game sucks, the graphics suck, this game is so boring” because they’re expecting it to be like Halo 3 or Gears of War or Assassin’s Creed and it’s not going to be like that at all.

Q: Graphics are getting better and better. Do you think that today’s first person shooter is actually going to desensitize kids to violence because they look just like people now. Read more

7 February 2010

How to plan for Katsucon 16

Filed Under Anime Conventions | 7 Comments

You know you’re excited for this.

Between learning the ropes as an official maid and staying in touch with staff to get permission to film at the convention, I realized that I’ve become a bit of an insider to Katsucon this year. With the con at a new hotel this year, a lot of things have changed. Instead of just giving my friends the heads up, I thought I’d extend my knowledge to all my readers. Here’s a few tips from me to you:

1) Get somebody to drive you there. I found out the hard way that the Gaylord is neither cheap to park at, nor easily metro accessible. Parking in their garages is $19 a day. In order to get there the public transportation way, you have to take the green line all the way to Branch, and then take a metro bus. From there, you still have to walk a quarter of a mile to the hotel. The cheapest and easiest solution? Have a friend who isn’t attending drive you there. You could even take a taxi to cut costs!

2) Bring your own food. Much like a theme park, the Gaylord is surrounded by lots of conveniently placed but pricey dining options. If you’re planning to spend your money in the dealer’s room, you might want to bring a bunch of sandwiches with you to cut costs. My solution? I’m bringing my rice maker and my friends and I are making bento lunches in the room while we’re there.

3) Get there Thursday… Or be ready to wait. If you were at the con last year, you no doubt remember the three hour lines those of us who pre-registered waited in to get inside. If you’re not a volunteer like me, be prepared for that again. (Seriously guys, maybe we should all not pre-reg next year?) I haven’t heard an explanation for why this is the case, but Katsucon registration will be done completely on paper, without the aid of computers. This is going to considerably slow things down, so get there on Thursday before the rush if you can.

4) Reserve me! OK, it turns out I’m a more popular maid than I’d expected, but I’m not totally booked yet! You should go to the maid cafe page and reserve me so I can serve you some food and meet you. Now that I know there’s more of you than just people I know in real life, it’d be great to meet some of my readers. A tip though– if you get me I might ask you if you’re cool with an interview for my latest documentary. =D

If I missed something and you have another question about the con, leave a comment and I’ll answer it if I can.

4 February 2010

Katawa Shoujo: empathy or exploitation?

Filed Under Video Games | 4 Comments

After reading Leigh Alexander’s article in Kotaku on Katawa Shoujo, a dating sim where the player tries to woo physically disabled and disfigured high school girls, I was too curious not to give the game a play-through*. The fact that another female gamer described this as a “polished, surprisingly compassionate and complex love letter to disabled girls,” inspired me to try to determine which politics were at work within the game.

Katawa Shoujo, Japanese for “disability girls,” is a game developed by Four-Leaf Studios, a group of anonymous members of 4chan. By now you’re probably expecting the worst from this game, as I was. However, “the internet hate-machine” is capable of producing empathy from time to time, as in this case. Far from the insulting parody you might expect, this game treats disabled individuals as human.

In the game, you play as Hisao, a high school student coming to terms with his status as a disabled person, having just discovered he suffers from Arrthymia, and sent to a school for students with special needs. While Hisao’s condition is invisible to others, the potential love interests in the game have disabilities that are anything but. You can choose to befriend disabled girls ranging from blind Lilly to burn-victim Hanako (and thankfully, Part One doesn’t allow any type of interaction beyond simply befriending the girls).

Game play is engaging. The dialogue and description is not only well written but belies a great deal of research into how each girl copes with her disability, details including how legless Emi uses different prosthetics depending on whether she is running track or walking to school, or how armless Rin eats lunch (with her feet). In other words, instead of putting the emphasis on the disabilities themselves, the main focus is on how each girl deals with her unique challenges.

The dialogue presents two views on disability. In some ways, disability is understated. “If I don’t mention [her disability], it’s like not discussing the elephant in the room,” Hisao says to the librarian. She replies, “It’s only the elephant in the room if you make it that way.” On the other hand, most plot points depend on assisting the girls in things they can’t do, like carrying things for armless Rin or informing blind Lilly of what the sunset looks like. This isn’t any different from other games in the dating sims, where you do favors for women to win their affection, but they still reveal the girls to be defined by their disabilities.

I talked to my friend John B. about the game, since his brother was born with Muscular Dystrophy, a disease that confined him to a wheelchair until the end of his life. He agreed that the game was surprisingly respectful and compassionate towards disabled people. However, his view was that this genre might not be the appropriate vehicle for spreading goodwill towards the disabled. So far, Four-Leaf has only released Part One of the game, and Part Two is likely to include nudity or worse (the studio has not said, but it’s logical to assume this since most games of this genre do). No matter how well done I’ve found the game to be, the ultimate goal still seems to be fetishizing disability.

As Alexander suggested, Katawa Shoujo takes the empathy we feel for disabled human beings and attempts to eroticize it. However, even this can be seen as a success. In this game, disabled people are seen as consenting and capable romantic partners, instead of the half-humans they are sometimes portrayed to be. I was impressed, but I won’t be playing part two anytime soon– disabled or not, pretend dating isn’t for me.

*Part One of the game, that is. The second part has yet to be released.

4 February 2010

An interview with Danny Ledonne, part II

Filed Under Interviews, Video Games | 1 Comment

This is the second installation of my interview with filmmaker Danny Ledonne, to be published in three parts. In this section, Ledonne shares his views on interactive narratives, and weighs in on how his own interactive narrative, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, fits into the canon.

Q: One thing we’ve touched on is how, in interactive narratives, you think you have a lot of control, but you don’t really have as much power as you think you do- it’s what the author of the narrative is influencing you. It’s linear at your own pace so it’s still going to go to the place that the creator deems. What do you think about that?

A: I know a number of game designers who have confided to me or they’ve said out loud in panel discussions, “You know, we’re actually not giving the player the opportunity to do whatever he or she wants, we’re giving them that feeling, we’re giving them perhaps that illusion. But ultimately all you’re doing is creating lines of codes, and on some level we’re still experiencing life in a linear way, we can’t travel through time, we exist in a three dimensional space and have gravity. So there’s all these restrictions in our real lives and in our virtual video game lives that are actually sources of constraint, so we don’t have no limitations, but I actually think that’s probably a good thing. If you were to exist, and there have been video games that have tried this, if you were to start a game with no explanation as to what it is, what you’re supposed to do, you don’t know what the controls are, and you just sort of go around and interact with objects but there’s really no clear reason as to why, you kind of have this existential moment in the game where you’re not sure what the purpose of the game is or what your purpose in the game is. So I think as much as we talk about interactivity, I think people still really secretly desire some elements of vary straightforward linear experiences in the game world because without that the experience just really falls apart. Some games do this in a more open ended way, “sand box games” like maybe The Sims or whatever where you can freely explore and experiences things. But even games like that have all kinds of assumptions built into them about how you’re supposed to interact with the game, and those are sort of, much like life, as with any game whether it be a video game, a board game, a sport, or an activity you play, there are rules to govern what the limits of the game are and how you play the game.

Q: I’ve heard that this is a negative, when interactive narratives are used in the news, that games do not give you that many choices and allow the creator’s bias to seep through. So you don’t think this is a negative? Read more

3 February 2010

Infographic eye candy: rainbow

Filed Under Design and Infographics | 1 Comment

It’s been a little more than a month (!) since my last infographic roundup, but gorgeous visualizations have not stopped showing up on the Internet, so I think we’re long overdue for another. This time: an infographic in every color of the rainbow!

Purple: Kung Fu Typing by Steven Von Worley