I don't know how to access the class roster, and nobody follows my blog because I suck, and I'm pretty sure the TA doesn't even follow me, so instead of going down the list in the roster to find people to review, I'm going to review the characters of people in class that I have worked with.
Gavin/Somebody Else - Lighting is important in the Crooked Cop character. The shadows cast from his hat and underneath of his eyes give him an ominous, threatening feeling. Symbolism is used here to represent that the Crooked Cop is sinister, and is clearly the villain in this duo. The mood on the Crooked Cop is very dark and very intimidating, as he is the villain and must be portrayed as a harsh character. All of this is exactly opposite from the other Charlie Chaplin like character, who has very bright lighting, very little shadows, and a very upbeat mood to him, symbolizing a fun character who is clearly good.
Jarrett/Haley - Nerd Boy and the Sorority Girl super villain were very interesting concepts, I enjoyed them a lot. I especially enjoyed the animation, for it's creativity and my extreme distaste for Pencil. The movements between the two characters are pretty much parallel, since both characters are essentially built the exact same way. The only difference between the two is that Nerd Boy can fly somehow, which Sorority Girl cannot, since she is just a normal person. The weight between the two characters is very much the same, again, because they are simplistic drawings and aren't supposed to represent anything to extreme or fascinating, just a normal guy and girl.
Jesse - Jesse's partner's hero wasn't posted on his blog. The Illuminator is a character that controls light as his super power, with a pretty decent Pencil animation accompanying it. Lighting is again important to this character, as it plays a major role in the character's story. The lighting is symbolic of the character's powers, as he is able to control light and use it to fight evil. The Illuminator can create his own mood through lighting, again, because he is able to control it, making it day or night, light or dark, giving off a sense of good or evil or threatening or inviting.
This .pdf is just like all of the other .pdfs that we read for these stupid blogs responding to stupid .pdfs. It points out that our faults are just areas of potential and can lead to self-improvement and all that stuff. Yeah. That's really obvious that the things that we aren't good at have can be improved and have potential. Really, all of these .pdfs that we read are exactly the same, and I don't really believe or take into account anything that they say, I just go through life living like I didn't just read a list of 20 things that I can use to improve my life.
But let's say that I was interested in these things, here are three that I would feel strongly about.
Topic number 2, What's My Problem, deals with making a list of all of your personal flaws, and adapting those to your real life so that you can be truly successful. He goes on about how making a list of your flaws can bring to light your true strengths. I disagree with this, why should we go out of our way to point out our own flaws? That seems very negative about ourselves. That's how depression starts. And we shouldn't dance around our own flaws and just avoid them like they're not there. That contradicts the whole self-improvement thing. If anything we should be doing the things that we are flawed at, and work on improving them and becoming more well-rounded people.
Related to that is topic number 4, Forget It: Don’t Try To Fix Your Weaknesses. Again, I disagree with the argument made in this topic. We should not only understand that we have limitations, but we should push these limitations as far as they will go, not work around them. If everybody in the world in history didn't push their limitations and didn't challenge themselves, what kind of world would we be living in today? What kind of technologies would we have? How would the medical field look? What about society, would we all be free as we are today? Our world was built by great people pushing their limitations in order to create something better than there already is. Stopping at your limitations doesn't lead to innovation.
Topic number 8 says that being normal is the incorrect way of being, and that people should try to be unique and individuals. I agree with this to a degree. It is very good to be unique and stand out from a crowd. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I don't think that people should go out of their way to be extremely weird, or else it gets obnoxious and nobody wants to be around a person. Also, being normal is also beneficial. Social skills and surviving in the world are built around this so called idea of normal, so in order to be truly successful in this world, one should find the healthy balance between normal and unique.
Regarding the creative process, I feel as if I am a very creative person, and I have multiple talents that hopefully will help me have a creative career field in the future. I feel as if I'm more creative than others, and a lot of the stuff that we learn about I just "get", it's not difficult or foreign to me at all. However, one of my greatest faults is managing my time, obviously since I get these blogs in minutes before they are due. Another fault that I have is that I don't know how to end projects or whatever, and they just go unfinished forever. But these things are small and can be worked on. I'm just a terrific creative person.
I think that one of the problems with our gaming presentation, the Alien Trivia Game with mini-games thrown in the middle of the game, is that the game just didn't seem that fun. I certainly don't think that I would ever play it, and can't envision too many people wanting to play something like this.
One of our faults is that our group decided to add some bullshit "use this game as a study tool" objective, instead of treating it like an actual game. There's NOTHING fun about study tools, no matter how hard we try to make it fun.
The rules of the game, I feel, were pretty clear. Answer the questions and move through levels, and survive stupid mini games at random points in the game. The mechanics were pretty straightforward too, use your mouse to answer questions, and then the same controls for the mini games that has been used in the same games for decades now. But I don't feel as if the goal was portrayed as well as it could have been. To be honest, I couldn't even tell you what our main goal was. Something about connecting with your classes to study better for the test, but then if you win the mini games you get to choose a new subject to answer questions about. If you're using this game as a tool to study for a test, why would you want to change subjects after playing some half-assed mini game? Don't you think that you would want to continue studying the one topic you were originally wanting to expand your knowledge on?
Overall, I think that our game was basically awful, and forget doing work on it, I think that the idea should be scrapped and completely started over. Thank goodness we actually didn't have to make this game, that would have been a disaster...
Due to limited resources, I will write out a small essay instead of creating an audio response. Sorry, don't dock too many points.
I would like to have the same super powers as Professor Xavier from the X-Men. He's psychic and and read minds and control objects and communicate telepathically and all of that jazz. I think that these would be cool powers, because they're not stupid flashy, like shooting fire or something, but are extremely powerful and could really ruin someone's day. Also, I wouldn't be a weird color or have anything physically wrong with me, so I could still go about everyday life with these neato super powers.
If I had these powers, I don't think that I would use them to fight crime or anything. Mostly because there's not a ton of crime that requires intense psychic powers to prevent. And also fighting crime is too much work, and I'm not into that. I would probably just fool around with these powers, just doing stupid things all day every day, probably for my own personal gain. I mean, how cool would it be just to read people's minds?
Yeah, I'm drawn to Professor Xavier. He's an extremely powerful superhero, and incredibly intelligent and seems to have everything together. I wouldn't mind being like Professor Xavier at all, minus that whole wheelchair thing. That probably sucks.
It's neat to think how one joke can be interpreted in two completely different ways. Sort of neat, I guess.
The affinity between the two is huge. Due to limited resources, locations, so on and so on, both videos have an extremely similar look to them, because there aren't too many different ways to add variety to shots in an enclosed elevator. The theme of one character being good and one being evil is shared in the two videos. However, there is contrast between the two videos as well. The Flirtation is told as a love story, with the twist at the end that completely changes the mood of the video, while Thursday the 13th, through sound ques and other elements, feels like a horror film the entire way through.
Space was very important in both of the videos. Both stories are told in a very confined, flat space, giving a sense of closeness and unease to the situation. Outside of the elevator, the world is much more deep, for example, in the beginning of The Flirtation, where the man is walking through the hallway to the elevator.
Shape was important when dealing with the characters. In both videos, the man is a very square character, which gives off the feeling of being powerful and in control, while the female was more rounded, friendlier and inviting. It's funny how that worked out, because of the endings of both videos, the normal stigmas of character shapes is completely contradicted.
Rhythm is utilized as a story telling device, more so in The Flirtation. The entire story has a steady rhythm, back and forth between the two characters, nothing seemingly wrong. But the rhythm is interrupted towards the end with the twist ending that the man is on an elevator to hell.
Here is proof that I went to that convention thing. It seemed a lot more like a high school science fair than a media showcase. To prove that I didn't just take a picture up top of the entire event, I also took a picture of one of the art displays. Today was a good day.
Unable to do the entire assignment to the full standards, just trying to pick up some points here.
In this scene of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, implied lines are masterfully used, as each character stares each other down. Yes, the actual lines give everything shape and make every visual aspect of the scene distinctive from everything else, but the implied lines really tell the story in this scene. Through the stare downs, intensity is built, and it's almost like we know exactly what is going through each character's head, just from the movement of their eye's and which direction they are looking. Space is also emphasized, showing us the great scope of the scenery around them. By showing wide shots we get a sense of the space, a sense of the massive cemetery that the three characters are at, which not only shows the scope of the world around them, but the scope of the matters at hand.
I do not own a Mac computer, and do not have the resources at the moment to create an audio commentary, and I'm going to get a poor grade on this assignment anyway, so I'll write out a short essay hitting all of the requirements. Being against copyright infringement is a good excuse, too.
I do not really play video games anymore, but Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one of my favorites from years ago, stands out as doing pretty much everything right. In the video posted, the first part of the Shadow Temple, the color plays a crucial part in creating the mood. The Shadow Temple was a very dark, gloomy part of the game, meant to instill fear and loneliness into the player. By using a very dark hue of colors, browns, blacks, greys, very little brightness in comparison to the rest of the game's world, and very saturated colors, the game designers create a very bleak and dead environment, which is the exact mood they aimed to portray in the dungeon. In contrast, the character runs around with a very bright hue of colors, and really stands out against the dark and gloomy dungeon.
The original image by Ben Goosens portrays a bizarre image of a house floating, with a person standing nearby and a skyline far in the distance. I was not drawn to this particular image individually, but rather the entire collection of works by Goosens. They are unique and interesting and dark and twisted, and this particular image seemed like it would have been a good fit for this one assignment. I chose to frame it the way I did to eliminate certain visual topics for this assignemnt.
First of all, the original image is a great example of space in artwork. There are the objects like the house and bird in the foreground, and then very far away is the skyline, and the picture possibly continues even deeper than that. In the re-framed image, I have eliminated this space, by putting all of the focus on just the floating house. The re-framed image is much more flat, less deep than the original image, it is just a solid shot of the floating house, no skyline or clouds in the distance to give us any idea of the world around the house.
Secondly, the shot type changed in the re-framed image. Originally, the image was an extremely wide shot, showing a huge vast scope of the entire world portrayed. In the re-framed image, which in comparison is a close up of the house, it could still possibly be considered a wide shot, or a medium shot, we don't know though, since we have no idea of the house's surroundings.
Finally, re-framing the shot takes away from the original's visual intensity. The original image the house was very ominous, and carried a lot of weight in the entire picture. The re-framed image, however, the house seems a lot less intimidating, because it is compared to nothing. Sure, it is still an intense looking house, but we don't see the spooky skyline, or the dark character, or the city in the background, or the great shadow that it casts.
Godwin's "Brainwashed" talks about how even from a very young age we have been conditioned to think and act a certain way in order to "fit in" this society like a "normal" person. He offers multiple suggestions on what people can do to break these trends and become more personal, successful individuals, making the world a more unique place.
One of his steps was "Acknowledging the Lizard". In this article, he refers to "The Lizard" as the part of our brain that worries about safety and worries about being different. It's the part of the brain that keeps the social order, that makes sure everybody plays their part in the big machine of society. Being aware of this part of the brain, and then resisting the biological messages that it gives us, helps us broaden our horizons and go against the grain, allowing us to create art and things that the world has never seen before. We have to be aware of "The Lizard" and ignore it in order to be successful creative individuals.
Another step Godwin talks about is "Connect". We're living in a time where we have to all adapt to the way the entire world communicates with each other. Ideas are shared in completely different ways now, and whoever is able to connect the best with whatever creative idea they have automatically becomes more successful than those resisting the change. Nearly all of the greatest ideas within recent years have been from people connecting on social networking sites, and the average, every day user finding them and jumping on board. Years ago it would be extremely difficult to get any of these ideas off of the ground, let alone make large sums of money from them, and connecting in new ways is a positive step forward in this area.
However, I do not think that these steps and ideas are useful to the Blogs we make for class. If you think long and hard about it, these Blogs go against what Godwin is trying to promote. They are assignments with strict guidelines that don't offer too much wiggle room for extreme creativity. If all aspects are not touched upon we lose points. Adding more information just becomes tedious for the grader. If the assignments were completely free form, making art with no guidelines, it would be a different story. You could even make an argument that the entire education system goes against whatever Godwin is saying. Everybody learning the exact same thing and doing the exact same assignments. How is that any different than everybody learning the exact same math formula, or everybody training for the same dead-end 9 to 5 job?
I would go as far as saying that The Doors is my favorite band of all time. At the same time, blues music is my favorite genre of music, and having The Doors cover John Lee Hooker, my favorite blues artist of all blues artists, is just a wonderful experience. I actually listened to The Doors version first, many many years ago when I got into Jim Morrison and the gang, and then shortly after discovered the blues, where John Lee Hooker became my favorite artist of the genre, and much to my surprise wrote a song that I had originally thought was written by The Doors.
The two songs differ greatly, however. Obvious differences first, the two songs are completely different genres. John Lee Hooker creates a traditional Delta blues track, while Jim Morrison and The Doors turned the song into a psychedelic rock song, making it sound very much like one of their own tracks. John Lee Hooker's song keeps a very steady rhythm throughout the entire song, is very laid back, simplistic track with the minimal beat keeping time, the guitar licks, and John Lee Hooker softly singing the blues. The Doors complicate the track; drums, guitar, keyboards, and the sense that Jim Morrison is almost shouting the lyrics to the song give their version a much more intense sounding song. The lyrics are the same, and Jim Morrison sings the song at nearly the same speed, but The Doors add multiple instrument breaks that weren't present in John Lee Hooker's original version, making the song almost twice as long. The Doors are much more intense in their presentation, a common theme for the band, especially in their live performances, which totally works for this song, and an attitude that John Lee Hooker could not get away with portraying.
Personally, I enjoy John Lee Hooker's original version better. The Doors played a fantastic song, and it very much sounds like it could be one of their own, but I enjoy the really chilled out, really relaxed blues music that John Lee Hooker makes himself. There's a different kind of passion and emotion and feeling that John Lee Hooker gives in his performance that The Doors are lacking. Years ago when I was younger I would have one hundred percent chosen The Doors, because my young mind was in that "Yeah! Rock music and guitars! Jim Morrison is the greatest performer ever!" mindset. But now that I have grown up and matured, I can appreciate different genres and song writing abilities, and John Lee Hooker just impresses me more. Although, I do feel as if I am still somewhat biased, as now I prefer blues music to all other kinds of music, and would choose to listen to it before any other kind of generic rock act nowadays.
In Jonathon Flaum's "Finding Your Howl", he tells the story of a wolf named Mumon who is raised in captivity and must learn its primal instincts again when introduced into the wild. Through trials and tribulations Mumon regains it's natural instincts, and learns once again to hunt and howl and to lead a pack. The story is about finding yourself, stripping away all of the expectations and things we've been conditioned to do by society and finding who we truly are. It's about finding your voice in a world where everybody has one, but nobody wants to listen to it. But once we find our own voice, discover ourselves and our own message, we can use our own "howl" and become greater than we ever were.
My favorite quote...
"When one man, for whatever reason, has an opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself." - Jacques Cousteau
I was blown away the first time that I heard this quote. I related to it so well. If I have all of this talent and creativity, and all of these ideas and stories racing in my head, why should I be the only person to enjoy them? I want everybody to experience these stories. I want everybody to be exposed to my ideas. I want everybody to know that I'm an extraordinary person, so everybody look at me. I'm going to lead an extraordinary life, fueled by my creativity, and everybody else is welcome on board for this wild ride.
"14 Ways to Get Breakthrough Ideas" is a serious of processes and steps that Mitch Ditkoff suggests doing in order to increase creativity. It includes obvious ones that have been told to us since the dawn of time, such as immerse yourselves in things, and tolerate ambiguity, along with other, more unique suggestions, such as "hang out with a diverse group of people". I hate to be a Negative Nancy with these kinds of things, but I believe that the majority of these things are essentially crappy suggestions, and I get a little pissed that this guy is making so much money off of lists like these. If we as people do things like number 4, "Make New Connections", and do the suggested act of making a list of words to connect, we are automatically going to think of words that we want to connect, not words that might fall into place. As soon as we go out of our way to try to achieve breakthrough ideas and find spontaneous creativity, the process becomes useless, since we are now looking for ideas, instead of just letting ideas come to us naturally. Being self aware has a negative effect on creativity, the best way to think creatively is to just be creative, not going out of your way to do so.
Some of the items on this list can lead to new ways of being creative, however. Number 10, "Hang Out With a Diverse Group of People", can open a person up to whole new walks of life that they never would have experienced before. Everybody has different upbringings, different backgrounds, different beliefs, different ways of doing things both small and large, so everybody has all of these stories to offer you, allowing you broaden your horizons and open up to new subjects to think about. Hanging out with new people won't give you new ideas instantly, but can open up paths to new ways of thinking.
Again, save for the one or two somewhat decent list items, they are all pretty cookie cutter, or are actually hurtful to creativity. Number 7, "Listen to Your Subconscious" is just a foolish thing to suggest to somebody. As soon as we are aware that we are listening to our subconscious, can we really call it our subconscious anymore? We can't set a time and date and select when we listen to our subconscious, we just do, and any other instance is counter productive, and we spend more time looking for answers than actually finding them.
The same argument goes for number 12, "Look for Happy Accidents". We can't go around our entire lives just watching accidents and hoping that they work out into some sort of miracle, or else a lot of things would never get done or invented. And once we start looking out for these accidents, again, are they really spontaneous, or are we creating these accidents ourselves in hopes that they will be some sort of breakthrough idea? If the items on this list work for some people, that's great, more power to them, but in my opinion, a lot of them are too distracting from a real creative process.
I've decided to do the activity for number 10, "Hang Out with Diverse Groups of People" since it seems like that's the only list item that I really approve of. Make a list of 10 people different from my usual crew. These 10 people are all residents in my dorm that I have relatively easy access to.
The Spanish girl upstairs
A homosexual friend of mine
The quiet, reserved photography major
The guy who wants to make documentaries
The extremely anti social guy who always looks down
Man who goes to the gym every day
The African American ITS major down the hall
The girl I met this weekend who is a communication disorders major
The girl I went to high school with but never made any real connection with
and Stephanie
Admittedly, I had a small bit of difficulty putting this list together. Outside of my normal group of friends, I don't really know anybody right off the top of my head that would be diverse enough to promote new ways of thinking. I believe the easiest one to spend time with first would be the homosexual friend, as we are already on very good terms and he seems to be very accessible. I don't know when the time table for this meeting could be, this weekend, this month, I don't know, but I don't want to plan any such meeting, as this goes back to my idea that looking for something creative hinders the creative process.
I apologize to everybody that found this article actually helpful. If doing all of these things helps you be creative, more power to you, but to me, you can't force creativity, it just is.
Asking me to select a small number of people that influence me is not fair, because all types of creativity influence me. My creativity is influenced by the creativity of others. I am influenced by filmmakers, and storytellers, and comedians, and musicians, I am influenced by artists. Seeing the master works of these artists is what motivates me to want to go out and create. What amazes me is how many of these artists can use these technical rules and skills so easily, to the point where the viewer doesn't even realize that they're being used, but develop this entire feeling and world right before our eyes with them.
For example, in Sergio Leone's For A Few Dollars More, tension is demonstrated throughout the entire film, and the release finally comes at the climax of the film. As with other Western films by Leone, tension is built throughout the entire film, the audience anticipates the main showdown, knowing that it's going to happen. We do not know who is going to win, we do not know the manner that these three characters are going to confront each other, all that we know is that something is going to go down at some point. Once this scene comes on, the audience's tension is at the max - the stare down, the anticipation. One of the greatest things about all Western films is the music, and the score here plays a pivotal role in creating tension. Without this unique piece of music, the effect that this scene has would be far less, and not nearly as exciting. Our release comes at the very end of the clip, at the end of the standoff, where we now know that everything is going to be okay for now in this world. What disappoints me is that I will never make a scene that lives up to the tension and anticipation I felt during this scene. The first time I had ever watched this scene I was on the edge of my seat, palms sweaty, the music chimes making each second last an eternity. Nobody possesses the skills to ever create a scene like this again, Leone was one in a million.
Now that I got my classic film hipster reference out of the way, let's move on to something a bit more popular and obvious. The Dark Knight is a great example of a story using contrast and affinity with its characters. Harvey Dent is the white knight, loved by everybody, the poster boy for good in the world. On the contrast, Batman is the dark knight here in this situation, hated and feared by the city of Gotham, a criminal. However, both fight for the same cause, and both initially share the same system of ideals and values, until the scene when Harvey Dent turns bad and yadda yadda yadda. I hate using something as common and popular as The Dark Knight as an example for anything, I feel as if I have more cinematic knowledge than that and I don't have to resort to one of the most popular movies of all time, but in reality The Dark Knight was a great film, and very well directed, and is a good example of contrast and affinity.
Finally, we go onto the matter of objective and subjective in film. Here in Pulp Fiction, the contents of the briefcase remain subjective. At no point do we know what's in the case. Is it gold? Is it the diamonds from Reservoir Dogs? Is it Marsellus Wallace's soul? We never know, the contents are completely up for interpretation and remain subjective the entire course of the movie. It's not like other, less exciting criminal and heist films, where we know exactly what the main characters are stealing, and what their motives are, and everything about everything, where everything is objective.
I know that Pulp Fiction has become extremely cliche over years. It's every teenager's favorite movie, because they know nothing about movies. But Pulp Fiction remains my favorite movie of all time, because the minute the credits started rolling, I decided right then and there that I wanted to be a film maker, and haven't looked back since. Yes, there are better movies, and much more impressive ones, but Pulp Fiction remains at the top of the list of the reasons why I do everything.
This is just a small taste of what influences me. I can really honestly find something in everything to be influenced by, some sort of creativity in everything that fuels my own. Which makes me excited for the future, whenever I get to express this creativity and hopefully influence other kids myself.
