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.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
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.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Reimagining Visual Framing
I picked Sally Mann’s One Big Snake. I was drawn to the photo because of the peace necklace that the boy is wearing. It is the only thing the boy has on which causes the audience to further focus on the necklace when they examine the picture. The original photo is a MS shot of a shirtless boy who is holding some type of snake skin in his wingspan. The snake covers up his eyes, and lines up with the horizon and the upper horizontal third in the photo. Mann also uses limited space in the photo by there being a background area but because it is out of focus the attention is automatically shifted to the boy because the viewer can not see clearly what is behind him. Mann uses a lot of lines in the photo but in different directions. The horizon, snake and the boy’s arms have horizontal lines, but they intersect with the vertical line his body makes. The intersection is where the new shape is introduced. It is the peace necklace and this intersection of lines makes the circle necklace pop even more. Mann also use the necklace itself to point directly at the peace sign by using two diagonal lines. The two shapes give a contrast from the boy’s actions which are all lines and the boy’s only piece of attire, the circular necklace. I changed the picture by making it an extreme close up of just the necklace. This gives more attention to the picture but it has much less of an effect. Instead of being something that the viewers’ eyes discover it is something that is just thrown in the viewers’ face. The space becomes flat because you can’t see anything behind the boy. You also lose all the contrast between line and shapes. The circle peace necklace does not have the same importance anymore because it is not contrasting itself from anything. It is the only shape that can be seen. I think Sally Mann framed the picture like this because she wanted her audience to find what she had hidden in the picture. Of course she could have just taken an extreme close up of a peace sign but it would not have the same feel for her or the audience.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Brainwash
http://changethis.com/manifesto/66.01.Brainwashed/pdf/66.01.Brainwashed.pdf
Seth Godin talks about the fact that we have to acknowledge the lizard so we can ignore it, allowing our creativity to not be held back. Godin explains that humans like lizards fear the idea of being laughed at. When this fear takes over a person, the creative side gets shut down and society was able to do this to brainwash people into doing something. They create a fear that if you don’t do something or don’t do it their way then you will have to pay the consequences for your actions. Godin says that only way to not allow the fear to hinder our creative process is to recognize when this happens and to understand that the only way to achieve it creatively is to move past the fear. This ties in with the blog we are working on because if you fear that people will wrongfully laugh at your idea, then you are not going to be true to your creative self and you wont be able to make yourself better at what you want to do. Another topic Godin talks about is to learn. He explains that school was created to teach kids a trade, or a single skill so they can achieve one job. Now jobs are no longer like that which means that school, a helpful stepping stone, is not the last step to learning. You have to constantly learn if you want to achieve. You have to learn from other people, your success, your failures, youtube, blogs and anything else that is out there to for you to learn from. The tie in with this topic and the blog is that we learn the basics about a lot of different things in class but it is up to us to take the knowledge to the next level. We have to meet with other students, read books, talk to professors and learn from youtube how to do more advanced techniques. I feel like these ideas are very useful. There are some students who can achieve everything they want simply from school, but there are others who can’t be reached by the way school systems are set up and I believe they should teach the ideas Godin has because they can be important to any students access. Students need to learn that there is more to learning then Math and Science. At an early age kids have to know that there is more than being a scientist, doctor, lawyer or teacher. They need to be able to experience everything so that they can do what they are best fit for which will in return be more beneficial to the country’s economy.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Dr. Dre VS Ben Folds
The two songs I am going to compare and contrast is Bitches Ain’t Shit by Dr. Dre and remade by Ben Folds. Ben Folds remade the song for more of a comedic feel, unlike most artists who remade a song out of respect for the artist. The lyrics of the songs are exactly same. Ben Folds is known for taking songs and making exact lyrical replicas of songs you would not expect. Ben Folds figured he would get a more intense reaction if he stuck with the original lyrics and put it to a different instrumental piece. In Dr. Dre’s original version the song has a low pitch. The percussion in the song has a very low pitch like in most classic hip hop songs. Ben Folds, who has a much higher singing voice than Dr. Dre, also adds a piano that is played in a higher bitch. Also the drums used in the cover have a higher pitch. This gives more of a contrast between the songs, which increases the comedic element he is portraying. Dr. Dre’s song has a much more intense feel to it. The song is a very dark and violent song has Dre uses loud instrumental and vocals, with a heavy feel. Ben Fold’s version is much softer. Instead of the percussion being the main instrument, he uses is piano to give it a softer feel. He also sings it a lot quieter than Dre’s. Ben Folds is known more for his piano playing than his bands’ ability to play the drums. Still, Ben Folds will use a drum set as the driving force or to increase a song’s intensity, but Ben Folds only uses a soft drum beat in the background to give his cover even more contrast from the original. Another difference between the songs are the timbre used. Dr. Dre uses a much heavier dark overall tone through out the song to fit his dark gangster feel he uses in his hip hop songs. Also his instruments have more of a computerized affected tone to it. Ben Folds timbre is a lot more bright, which again gives it a contrast between the original song. Ben Fold’s version also has a more natural feel to it. It is more simple because it is just his vocals, a piano, and a simple drum beat which fits into his stereotypical persona. When you listen to Bitches Ain’t Shit you expect the song to be sung by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg or some other rapper. You do not expect the song to be sung by some white pop singer who plays a piano and looks like a computer geek. Ben Folds uses irony in this song and his other covers because his covers are not what the types of songs Ben Folds sings about. Finally Dr. Dre would be a more reliable narrator because Dre grew up in a poor neighborhood and had a very troubled background dealing with drugs and gangs. So when Dre sings the song a listener would expect that he has done things like this before or this is his opinion of women. Ben Folds grew up in a suburb and does not share the beliefs he is singing about. I personally prefer Ben Folds version because I enjoy the comedic value to it and I think the vocals and instruments are better in his version.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
My Howl
Finding Your Howl by Jonathon Flaum tells the story of a red fox who had been taken into captivity for protection and later placed back into the wild. The wolf’s name was Mumon and he decided to search the forests for his howl, so that he could lead his pack and to help them survive. During his search Mumon finds a deer and chases it. The deer talks to Mumon asking him how he knows he is able to take down something so much bigger than himself. Mumon answers he just knows. Mumon lunges at the deer, killing it and starts to eat it. Mumon feels remorse for the deer, wishing he didn’t have to kill. Mumon starts talking to a raven who tells him that he must not feel shame for being what he is. The raven explains that he can hear the howl, but Mumon can not because he is holding back. Mumon started running at full speed and feel his old self stripping away. Eventually Mumon runs into a farmer who shoots and kills him. Mumon then sees people dances and drumming around a fire. Mumon realizes that the beat of the drum is coming from his own heart. Mumon walks into the fire and howls. He realizes that the tribesmen are actually his own pack and they let out with a howl of their own.
This story explains that if we decide to find our freedom-howl-then there is a lot we must give up and change to do so. We must separate ourselves from the world we know and from our friends. We must do things that we never thought we could or would ever have to do. We may mistake this process for death, just like when Mumon was killed by the hunter, but it is actually our souls finding freedom and discovering the animal inside. This is not a quick process. You can not just wish for freedom and find it instantly. You must do things you thought you would never have to do in order to discover what you want.
Monday, January 17, 2011
WAYS TO GET IDEAS
2: IMMERSE
I disagree with Ditkoff’s suggestion about immersion. This is a valid point that he makes, but I do not believe that it is for everyone, or at least not for me. I can see the benefits for both the employee and the employers by giving workers time to work on their own projects but I don’t believe that immersion works for everyone. For instance if I am trying to write a script for a movie, I do not sit in a quiet room with a pen and stack of paper. If I am trying to write a script I need to do other things, I need to be inspired by my surrounding. I take pieces of events and compile them together. I take song meanings, conversations with friends, bits of dreams and turn that into a script. I do believe the some people need to have complete focus and immerse themselves into a project for it to get done, but I am not one of those people.
3: TOLERATE AMBIGUITY
I strongly agree with Ditkoff’s opinion tolerating ambiguity. If you want to accomplish something, you wont be able get it exactly right on the first attempt. No one is perfect and if you want to create something you can do it, but you have to do it wrong before you know how to do it. If you want to write a song, write a song and then work from there. Learn from your first attempt, if it did not work out the way you hoped the first time then you need to ask yourself what you need to change for the second time. I implement this idea all the time in my own life. When I am trying to write a scene or a piece of dialogue I will write it over and over again. I will have some drafts where everything is essentially the same except for a few words and I will have some where the two scenes are complete opposites. Then I look at all of drafts and figure out which one works best for what I am trying to accomplish with the story.
10: HANG OUT WITH DIVERSE GROUPS OF PEOPLE
The other idea that Ditkoff brings up is the idea that if you want to breakthrough you have to hang out with diverse groups of people. If you work with only one group of people you can perfect your skills working in that group, but eventually you will reach a point that you can not get past. If you work with different people you will get new ideas and a new set of eyes on how something should be done which can help if it is successful or a failure. If it successful you learn about a new way of doing something that you thought could have only been done one way. If you fail you learn that the way you were doing something was more successful and you should stick with it until something else that you can try comes along. In media for instance if you only work with one group of people your projects should get better for a while until your group gets to the best of its abilities and there is no where else to go. If everyone in the group works with other groups then each person can add things like maybe we should try this because it worked for us or lets definitely not do this because it just didn’t work.
Prompt 12:
What “failed experiment” or unexpected outcome might be interesting for you to reconsider? Who else might you invite to participate in this effort?
Over the summer my friends and I tried to make a sitcom and put it on YouTube. The production was what seemed to be a huge flop. We spent weeks writing on a script. We were all happy with the script and we all thought that we really had something here, something that could be successful. It was not successful. We never started taping anything. None of us knew what to do. We had no idea how to tape a scene or how to direct. We did not of a camera to record any scenes and we had no editing equipment to edit our nonexistent shots with. During this upcoming summer though we are going to try and actually make this “failed experiment” work. Now that I, and a few other of my friends, have some experience on how a production is suppose to go we will try and use what we learned to make this production actually work. We plan on bringing in other people we have met who are more familiar with working a camera and using audio to help us take our script and turn it into a video. We also plan on getting some new people to help us out with the script so we can get other people’s opinions on what we have so far.
Blog Assignment 1A Who influences you as a Creative Person?
Wes Anderson is a creature of habit. He will use the same actors and actresses throughout his movies. He uses similar shots in all of his movies. And he always shows and example of contrast and affinity in his movies. In the movie Darjeeling Limited there is a lot of contrast and affinity with the brothers. The brothers are all wearing suits and they wear the same outfits throughout the entire film. Anderson uses this to express that the three are brothers, since he can not show a similarity with their physically features since the actors are not actually brothers. Wes Anderson does express contrast though with the brothers because of the way they act. Each brother has a characteristic about them that shows the differences between them. These characteristics appears to show how different the brothers truly are from each other, but at the end when they are reunited with their mother you find out that each characteristic they portray is something they inherited from their own mother’s personality. Another example of contrast in the film is the fact that the three brothers wear no other colors besides black, white and gray. Jason Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody both have dark black hair and eyes, Owen Wilson is the only brother who has blonde hair but his face is covered with bandages so the audience focuses more on the white bandages than the blonde hair. Wes Anderson puts these brothers in a world filled with vibrant colors such as burnt orange and turquoise and all the other people seen have different skin tones. Wes Anderson uses this to show contrast between the brothers and the world they live in to express that their upbringing has caused them to be very distant with the world around them.
The movie In Bruges is written and directed by Martin McDonagh. McDonagh uses Text and Subtext throughout the entire film. There is hardly anything that a character does or says that lacks misdirection. The story follows two hit men who appear to be waiting for instructions from their boss about the next job. As the movie goes on, the audience finds out that Colin Farrell’s character is a hit man who botched his first job and killed a kid. His boss played by Ralph Fiennes who plans on killing Farrell for killing a kid. There is also a midget who is acting in a movie. McDonagh makes the audience believe that the only use for this character is for comic relief during depressing character discovery. At the end of the movie though Fiennes goes to kill Farrell with exploding bullets and instead hits the midget in the head. Fiennes looks at the body and thinking it is a kid puts his gun to his head and says you have to stick with your principles. Comic relief is constantly used as a misdirection in the movie. Towards the beginning of the movie Farrell’s character is sitting outside a tower. An American tourist walks up and asks him if he saw the view, Farrell says he doesn’t care for it, but its not like the tourist will ever know. The tourist asks him why and Farrell tells him its because he is fat and there are a lot of narrow stairs. The audience would take this as an example of comic relief but at the end of the movie Fiennes tries to go into to tower but because a tourist had a heart attack the tower is closed. Fiennes then kills the guide at the tower which shows Fiennes anger and love of killing. It also proves that the scene was not just for comedic relief.
A recent example of film that has created inspiration is the film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky. Darren Aronofsky uses tension and release in his controversial psychological thriller. Aronofsky puts the audience in a roller coaster situation. There are two types of tension used in this film; sexual and a sense of fear. Natalie Portman’s character, Nina must abandon her previous ways of life to be able to play the Black Swan in her ballet company. To do that she must explore new sexual boundaries. In one scene Nina is in her bed and she starts masturbating. While this is going on looming music starts playing and become louder and the camera zooms up on her face, and shows her masturbating and then the tension releases when Nina looks to the left and sees her mom sleeping. Nina also has sexual experiences with her dance rival played by Mila Kunis, but the tension is reveled when she wakes up and finds out that it is all a dream. This brings the audience deeper into the film and shows the changes that Natalie Portman’s character is going through. Aronofsky also builds tension through the dreams Nina is having. In one scene Nina is picking at skin by her nail and then starts tearing off the skin around her arm and hand and the scene releases when she wakes up. This shows how Nina is changing and she is shedding her skin while she is being replaced by the “black swan.”
Friday, January 7, 2011
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