Comments for blogs

I commented on stuff!!

blog 1

a different blog 1

blog 2

a different blog 2

blog 3

a different blog 3

soundscape blog

another soundscape blog

song comparison

another song comparison

song comment

another song comment

visual framing

another visual framing

Read More

(10) I'm strong. I'm weak.

2. What’s my problem?

No one likes to talk about his or her weaknesses. That is not something I ask friends or family on a regular basis. “Hey, so if you were to make a list at everything I suck at, what would that list look like?” But David Rendall says otherwise. David thinks that by correctly identifying and listing our weaknesses, we learn more about our strengths. I love when he talks about this in his own life. He lists his weaknesses and then shows how his life is utilizing the exact opposite traits. He doesn’t like authority, so he runs his own business. He likes talking, so he talks for a living. I think this is a great point he makes, and while it may seem like an obvious one, putting it in words that are easy to understand and showing real life examples are a great benefit.


4. Forget it: don’t try to fix your weakness

I have flaws. But I also have strengths. So do I try to fix my weaknesses or do I work on my strengths? David would argue that concentrating on my weaknesses is pointless and will only be painful and slow. To summarize his point, he gives this advice: We all have limitations. I think this is another great point of his and something that we all should think about. Well, let me specify what I do and do not agree with. I cannot be a writer. I could not make up riveting plots, personable characters, or cold sweat educing action drama. But in my opinion that doesn’t mean it is not something I could work on. In fact, I think some good could come from working on weaknesses. Now that doesn’t mean I think I could be a writer, but writing in my spare time could assist in improving other areas of my life that are more important.


8 Freak: the power of uniqueness

David states that being unique is a great quality to have. And it definitely is. The people that succeed in this world don’t do what is expected of anyone. Banksy is a now famous street artist. I have talked about him many times before but that is because he is a great illustration of this class in real life. His art is different. He is different. People don’t want normal. They want a mysterious graffiti artist with a passion for rats and strong political opinion. They want what hasn’t been shown to them before. They want people that use their flaws to strengthen what they have going for them. I agree fully with David on this point, it is better to be exceptional than it is to be normal.


My strengths and weaknesses

Well, I hate bragging, and I have pointing out what I’m not good at, so this section kind of sucks. Haha.

Nonetheless, let me start with my strengths. I love art and I love technology. I love taking a story, a script, and using both of those to better tell the words. I think I am good at taking words and visualizing what I want them to look like on a screen. But I think my favorite part and where I excel the most is postproduction. I have always been kind of a closet nerd, so I love computers. I could, and do, spend hours upon hours editing one video just to get it exactly how I want it.

I am not a good writer. Trying to write a script for the joke was challenging for me. I could not get enough outside of the box to come up with something truly creative. But I will not let that stop me from trying (so take that, David Rendall)

Read More

(9b) The end of the world is coming, quick, play a game to help

Collapsus.com

Read More

(9a) Reflections on our games

     When you are by yourself behind your desk in your room, everything in your powerpoint seems very simple to understand.  But when you step in front of a classroom of students and your teacher, the words and concepts seem harder to explain.  For our group, the concept of missions seemed difficult to express.  What we were trying to explain was that each character (i.e. Greek, football player, nerd, etc…) would have specific missions that are relevant to their specialty.  Like a football player would have to go to tryouts, while a nerd would have to go to a science fair.  But also, the players would have some missions that all groups would attend (like a party or orientation)

     We had a simple time explaining the layout of the game.   In a world where video games are well known phenomenon and it is something that people experience on a daily basis, explaining things in video game terms is a good way to go.  So, when we said that our game would be an MMO, similar to World of Warcraft, I think that the class knew exactly what we meant and could picture it in their heads. 

Read More

(8b) Sun v Clouds, and critiques

Critiques

http://lworthington.blogspot.com/2011/05/nightnurse-vs-biohazard.html

Night Nurse was a little confusing to me at first. With the creepy moon and dark lighting, I was not sure if she was a super hero or a villain. I do like the color chosen for her though. The bright pink helps to identify her as a good guy. Maybe if she would have been white and pink, this would have been more obvious.

Biohazard is a very well put together villain. His red and black colors are typical evil colors and add to his look. In contrast to Night Nurse, he appears to be grungy and sloppy, while Night Nurse is clean cut and well put together.

Looking at the video, it appears that Biohazard is not the brightest light bulb. Night Nurse obviously throws a reflective barrier over the poor innocent girl, but Biohazard still shoots his evil snots at her. The snots proceed to bounce off of the shield and jump right back in his face. Instead of shooting over the shield at Night Nurse, he just gives up and flies away. This could also be some subtext found in the video. It doesn’t come and tell us right away that Biohazard is a complete idiot, but upon further inspection of the film, we can see through his actions that he is indeed a complete idiot.

http://yingqi203mdia.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-05-29T19%3A16%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7

This hero/villain was one of the only that I saw that used lighting to it’s advantage. Even though they both have on colors that could be villainous, the shadows are a complete give away. The villain has shadows behind him, and even some on his face that is cast by his hat. This was a nice touch and helped make the contrast between them more obvious.

Apart from black, the colors of the bad guy are blue and purple, while the hero is proudly wearing red and yellow. These are great color palettes to emphasize the difference between the two. The villain looks very suspicious and like he’s trying to hide, while the hero looks proud and ready to go kick some villain butt.

This brings us to our next point, movement. The posture and position of the characters tells us about their personality. The evil guy looks sly because of his smirk, popped collar, and covered body. The hero looks like bold and like she is ready to get physical because of her posture. Her sword ready to be drawn and her determined look help add to this over all feel. These emotions are not said aloud, but can be observed.

http://m2d0i3a.blogspot.com/2011/05/wolverine-8a.html

Pepsi vs Crush. Oh yeahhh. This was my favorite hero/villain assignment, because of the characters, how they drew them, and their animation.

Contrast between the two in many ways. The first being colors. The pepsi can wears the obvious red and blue. And the crush rocks the orange and white. But the subtext of this rivalry can be seen in the brands. Pepsi and Crush are competing brand names and that is the root of their violence. That is what set this team apart from others, it was a very intelligent choice of hero vs villain.

The video may be the best part of this assignment. The movement of both the hero and the villain is very impressive. When the pepsi gets angry, he squirts his arms out to attack the cashier. That movement in itself is very evil and you can tell that he is a violent villain. The mortal combat techno song added a lot to their fight scene. The crush can obviously destroyed the pepsi can. When he jumped up they kept the size and weight of the character very consistent. Overall, they did a great job and put a lot of thought and time into their characters and animation

Read More

(8a) superhuman superflight

Read More

(7) Got some jokes for ya'll

here is the second video, I cannot embed it because it's private

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU2zdmFVxC0&feature=youtu.be

Our assignment was to make two videos using the same joke.  We could not use sound recorded from our camera, so that made the assignment much more challenging.

I don’t really know what “binary terms from week one are.” But I have my notes from week one so I will talk about some of the terms we learned.  Both scripts we voted on were shot in a bar, so we decided to shoot both in the same place; that would be some affinity right there.  And of course the fact that we used the same base joke for both scripts is also similar.  But because they were recorded in the same location, we had to get creative to make them look and feel different.  In other words, we had to use some contrast.  The first thing we decided to do was to film one with an old school silent film look, and then film the second with voiced over sounds.

Taking into account the silent film feel, the rhythm of the videos is much different.  Because of the word slides, the rhythm of the silent film would have to be choppier than the other video.  The viewer must watch the action unfold, then read what just happened.  This made the video seem much slower compared to the other video.  We used movement to counteract this effect.  The camera frequently jumps to keep the viewers attention.  If we were to keep the camera still while having the slides interrupt, the video would seem unnecessarily drawn out and boring.  In the color video, we did not have nearly as much camera movement, because that would have been too fast and confusing.

            

Read More