Category Archives: technoirnews

What’s Black and White and Read All Over?

For the Newspaper assignment I chose to do the TechNoir shooting scene, and I included some other easter eggs for Terminator fans.

For this project I chose to use the Bar shooting scene because it had a more diverse group of people to talk about, so I thought it would give me more interesting perspectives. When I started the assignment, I thought I wouldn’t have much to write about but as I was doing it, I had to keep resizing the newspaper because I was running out of space. There was so much more to talk about than I expected, I wanted to include a brief overview of the event, an eye witness report, a statement from the owner of the club, commentary, and more. There was simply not enough room. I used a Newspaper template on Canva to evenly space everything out, I also googled the pictures that I used for each story. The articles on the side are supposed to be Easter Eggs to the movie. For example, I put up a missing poster for Sarah Connor and I made the phone number as close to T-800 as I could so the joke is that he submitted the missing persons report. There’s more easter eggs in this newspaper, Terminator related and not, but I don’t want to give them all away. Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment. It was a good way to get creative and it didn’t take too long to complete.

The Terminator

For this assignment we had to look at a tech noir film and select a scene. I chose to watch the terminator shootout scene in the police station and turn it into a newspaper article that could have been released the following day. I used Canva’s newspaper theme and created some attention grabbing titles. I then found some wanted posters of the terminator online and put them into the newspaper as well. Lastly I wrote some text about what happened and what survivors had to say about the event. Overall this was a very fun assignment.

Extra, Extra!

For this assignment, I decided to primarily focus on the shootout scene from The Terminator, while also including some references to the nightclub fight. I used a newspaper template on Canva in order to format everything, and then typed directly into the document. I changed several of the fonts to make it more newspaper-esque, as it seemed like the template was initially meant to be used as an announcement and not a legitimate newspaper. I included photos of TechNoir and the Terminator, as well. The picture of the Terminator took some time to find, as I wanted a photo that looked like it could have been sourced from a security camera or something similar. I included the actual LAPD phone number, as well as some other small details that I researched. I enjoyed making this, especially having to write as though I was a reporter! I think the fake quotes I included were a lot of fun, too.

Black Mirror Times – Breaking News

I created a newspaper page on the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation” because it’s my favorite film I’ve watched for this class. It was nice to just change the content on the newspaper to relate to the episode. I used Canva for this assignment using a Newspaper template that they provide. My favorite part is the bottom right article preview because this character actually used the “#deathto” on the criminal who was behind this killing and it wasn’t the best idea because the criminal realized that they were looking for him and he was hesitating in the scene so I thought it would be creative.

Today in death race news…

Jim suggested the idea of doing a news report on an event from a tech-noir film, which sounded fun to me so I ran with it. I watched Death Race 2000 recently so I decided to work with that, even if it strays pretty far from noir. As Wikipedia describes it “Set in a dystopian American society in the year 2000, the film centers on the murderous Transcontinental Road Race, in which participants score points by striking and killing pedestrians.” There is an incident in the film where a motley group of rebels make an attack on the race, and the government and media place the blame on the French Air Force. That seemed newsworthy. For material to work with, I though I would use the crash scene and the Presidential speech about it. I fed some of the details to ChatGPT and told it to make a news article out of it. Serviceable, but not enough. I had the bright idea to ask Needs More Boom to rewrite the scene in its inimitable style, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the output. I had ChatGPT rewrite that as a news article, then fed the articles and the speech to Notebook LM and had it generate one of its goofy podcasts. I added a Dr. Oblivion introduction to that, along with some open source background music for news.

That gave me a bunch of stuff to work with. I made a new subdomain on my site and installed another WordPress, and looked for free news themes, settling on FreeNews. I added all my stuff as posts, then looked through the documentation for clues on how to set it up. Fortunately it wasn’t very difficult. I just had to put categories on the posts and customize the theme options for the main banner article and the sidebar categories.

It’s still pretty lame, since real news sites have much more content, and I didn’t even try to tweak the design other than the header image. But it at least looks news-ish. I should probably apologize for the creepy clown, if I may use that adjective. Needs More Boom came up with that little addition, and the Notebook LM people were quite taken with it, so I chose to appease the evil tech spirits.