Freaks and Geeks RULE!

Essentially what David Rendall is talking about is that as a person we see our weaknesses, well as a weakness. We see the fact that we are bad at something as a flaw, when he thinks that we need to look at it as a strength. The second suggestion he makes is that he believes a weakness is not a flaw, but actually helps you out. He uses himself as an example. He says he hates working with groups and he is very  interactive. Instead of trying to fix his “weaknesses” he uses those to help out his strengths and becomes a professor who gets to walk around and talk to students and doesn’t have to work with anybody else. I believe he makes great points when he says weaknesses are important clues to strengths because that is a positive way of looking at something that most people probably see as a negative. And success comes from this because you are making a better fit for yourself so you have a better chance of being successful. His seventh suggestion is the importance of finding the right fit, finding that balance between what your unique qualities-how big of a freak you are-and your situation. In this suggestion he makes a great reference with Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. He explains that Rudolph’s unique characteristic makes him a freak to his friends, family and himself. But at the end of the movie the fact that the situation changed allowed him to succeed because of his weakness instead of his weakness hindering his abilities. He further expresses the importance uniqueness plays into success in his 8th suggestion. He talks about the most successful tower in the world is the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it is flawed. If the tower stood up straight then it wouldn’t be interesting and nobody would want to see it. There had been multiple attempts to fix the tower but they all failed and in fact made the tilt even worse. He makes a good argument about the fact that you can’t listen when people say you need to fix this or change this weakness because if they fixed the tower then people wouldn’t travel across the globe just to see it. One of my personal strengths is that I am able to talk in front of a large crowd. The bigger the group the better at talking and presenting myself I become. One of my weaknesses is that I can’t do something I am not interested in. I can take this weakness as a strength though because it shows me the importance of doing what I want to do if I want to be successful. This weakness shows that trying a risky profession can have a bigger payoff then doing something else like being an engineer because I have a stronger passion to create media then doing math and science all day.

 FREAKS!

Collapsus

Collapsus

My Superhero

My Wordz

Creation

My boy Eric's Animation

I am now going to talk about Eric’s animation of his hero,  The TRASH COMPACTOR!!, and his villain, The Mogul. I am going to focus on this color and the hue choices he made because I thought that really made his hero and villain stand out more so then other animations that I have seen. I think his use of grey for a hero and his use of purple for a villain was very unique. Typically, at least from my colorblind point of view, I see a character lacking color is an example of more a villain type character, but his use of grey makes his hero seem more mysterious. The fact that he uses grey makes me think he doesn’t see good and bad as clear as black and white, to him it is more of a grey area, see what I did there. Typically you think of the character with the more powerful color to be the hero, but Eric decided to use the strong color, purple, to show his villain being power hungary and flashy. Now the purple, again from my colorblind eyes, seemed to be darker-less brightness-than other forms of purple which further expresses the fact that he is a bad guy to the audience. In the animation the Trash Compactor isn’t effected much by brightness, but the use of the lights in the drawing makes him to be much brighter then the city he lives in, as if he was the last glimmer of hope for the city to fight of guys like the Mogul. I wouldn’t say much was done with the saturation, but he uses the other two characteristic so well that by using saturation I feel like it might be too much. 

Jason's Epic Animation!

I am going to talk about a Jason’s animation of Mr. Sun and Malicious Moon. Now it is true that we were partners with this project, but we decided we wanted to see where we took each of the characters. We meet up together to come up with character design, but after that we took our information of each character and decided to see what each person came up with. We decided we wanted to go with something as well known as the sun and moon for our hero and villain because we wanted something that was so well known and place them in a different context. We also used that characteristics of each for the audience to subconsciously understand who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. We were curious to see what aspects would be examples of affinity and what other ones would be contrasting characteristics. So in this post I will talk about his animation in comparison to mine. I would definitely say that I really liked his use of movements and the way we contrasted how our characters would move. His characters moved like they had the weight of the actual moon and sun fighting. Their moves were slow and more powerful, which is also shown in the part where the sun’s muscles grow to defeat the moon, compared to my take on the characters who were more like super humans with the powers of the sun and moon. He also used Overlapping Action, which is something my presentation lacked. His sun’s arm was growing and moving while he went in for the final punch against the malicious moon. There was not really any parallel movements in his animation though, which I feels further helps his animation.

Video Game

I think one point that probably didn’t come across in the presentation was the fact that we intentionally tried to make a bad video game. We had spent the quarter working so hard on our projects and then doing the powerpoint the morning of the presentation and that really took away from our final project. So for this project our group decided instead of focusing on making a really great product, lets make the presentation as best as we possibly can and see if we can make this product look good. I did feel like our presentation was very strong. We achieved our goal of an epic presentation and that was the main goal, we wanted that to carry our project. We wanted to make something flashy with epic music and use my fast talking, bullshit comments to be the main focus. We achieved that to such an excellent point that we were picked as the best game design group and after we presented, both in the lab and in the class, I received endless comments from people I had never met before who told me they loved the project. I feel like we could have made our project even stronger if we used more videos, trailers and other photoshopped pictures. These things were the main parts of our powerpoint and if we would have been able to use them for every point/slide our presentation would have been a lot stronger. I would personally say that mechanics are the easiest part of a game to determine. I think they are the easiest because in a lot of ways they create themselves by just developing and brainstorming games and mostly because mechanics are something that is typically assumed by the gamer. They expect the joystick to move the player, the left trigger to zoom and the right trigger to shoot. Now this is true for shooter games but a typical game’s default control settings are something a gamer assumes and understands typically before actually playing the game. Also when they determine things like settings, they typically determine other mechanics as well. If they want to make a real world game then the characters will typically follow rules of physics and other real world limitations. If they put their character in space then we assume that the character will float around more unless in either situation if they are given something that allows them to break the assumed mechanics.

Blog 7

With the two videos/scripts we wanted to create contrast as much as possible with hardly an affinity. So we took the same joke, but had contrasting genres and followed different characters by portraying the mom and son in one video and the toys/train set in the other video. We did want to use tension and release in both videos at identical points. We wanted to use rising tension during the entire film and have the release come at the very ending right before it fades black so the audience can see that there is some sort of connection between the two films. In the Fantasy Joke we wanted to focus on the use of Lines by using the characters to make virtual lines with their bodies. In the beginning of the movie all the characters are using their bodies to make a virtual line to point straight up to the sky. This is to show that there is something in the sky that they believe in and that they are waiting for. Once they believe that their god is no longer with them the character’s bodies point in other directions, except for the main toy who brings faith back to the group. He is standing up straight to show his power over the rest of the group and that he still is faithful that their god will return. There was also some subconscious use of lines in the dark joke video because there are two scenes, the bedroom and the tapestry, where there are actual lines pointing towards the son’s face. We focused on Space a lot in the dark joke movie because we wanted to increase tension because there is so little living space in the house where they live. We wanted to make it look as if the mom was actually trapped in the home and we wanted the audience to feel uncomfortable with the very flat/limited space that was used.