Arts First Reflection

With the last project with the YouTube upload contest- I thought it was very interesting to hear the different techniques that people used to promote their videos. I learned a lot about how videos on YouTube get there and how videos become such a hit.
Overall Arts First has taught me a lot about media convergence which I found to be very intriguing. Convergence culture was a subject that I really enjoyed learning about and the thoughts of Henry Jenkins made me want to learn more about his ideologies. My favorite section that we learned about was film; actually getting to create a film was something that I would love to try and do again. After learning about film and Final Cut Pro, I really would like to try and create some more work to share with people. I really enjoyed this course and I look forward to learning more about film and media convergence. Thanks for a great semester :)

Video Critique 2

Stephy and Jenna's video "Women in China," was a very strong and powerful video. The message in their film was to show the progress of women gaining respect in China through time. It shows how China has changed to perceive women as equal (or superior) to men, which is completely different than the beginning times in China. The way in which the film makers did this was by using a lot of text to tell the story. By them mainly using words to tell us the story and incorporating some images, it was a visual representation of what the text was saying. The elements in this film that I think worked extremely well were the old images that they began with and they slowly progressing toward modern images and finally into film and video. Another thing that worked really well was the filters that they used. They used soft edges and different color correctors to enhance the effect of the movie. My favorite thing about the film that worked very well was the background music. I thought the music was very subtle and elegant, but tied the whole movie between the old China times and the modern times. If they were to continue to working on film, I think that if the entire film was in black and white and the words were in red (or another powerful color) I think would have made the film much stronger. The timing of the text was short at some points and longer at others; sometimes the longer text went by too fast and the shorter text was up for too longer. I think that just some cleaner editing would have enhance the film also. Overall, this was my favorite film of all of them!

Artist Statment.

The influence for this video, which portrays the theme of nutrition, came from the environment that we live in. People have to eat and in the fast paced world today, whatever is quick and easy is usually the best option. However what may be the best option at the time may not be the best health option, which leaves the choice to be healthy up to the consumer. This video is an example of how our environment is surrounded by the negative effects of fast food but that healthy options are always around the corner.

Video Critique

Zenebou and Harriet's film, Our Green Environment had a very strong and interesting message. The content that if there is not environment then there is no life because we depend on the environment for many different things, was clear and present throughout most of the film. The transition from the nature shots of trees and birds to paper products and other products made by trees was a little shaky and hard to follow; such an abrupt change left the audience lost and confused, it was only through more images of paper and wood, did I then understand what the film was trying to say. If they were to continue working on this film they could cut out some of the images toward the end of the film, including the shots of soap products and the vending machine filled with chips. This distracted from the main message of the film. Also at the beginning of the film some of the images of the trees, we extremely short and cut out to the next image rather quickly. But as the first part of the film played out, there were very short clips of the trees and then long more peacefully images. It would have enhanced the video if the tree/ nature section had longer clips and wasn't so fast and choppy; transitions would also help to achieve that as well.

Final On Campus Event- African Art Gallery.

For my final event I choose to go to the African Art Gallery featured in the Woodland Art Gallery. I found all of the pieces very unique and interesting. The gallery had many different masks that represented ranking in African tribes, and each one was pieced together differently to convey a different type of rank and effect.Some of these pieces of art work are used as shrines or are carved from mainly wood and are meant to be honored as a symbol of someone or something. Another thing that the gallery had a lot of were small statues/ figurines; there were various ones that represented different themes, one theme was Women and Fertility, another was about symmetry and almost all items had some type of human representation portrayed in the art. My favorite piece that was in the art show was the Queen Mother and Child by Ghana Fante. I really loved that almost all the pieces were carved out of wood and each had a special representations of something.

Video Project Update

Thus far with the project Tammy and I are working on, is going extremely well. We both have contributed to the actually filming for the project. In the classroom, editing and piecing together our sub-clips, we both have taken turns working the mouse. Although we went with Tammy's idea in the beginning, both of us have contributed different ideas that we thought would improve the project. We have been working together extremely well, and that camaraderie has really turned this project that we are both proud of and excited to show.

The concept of our film is the fast food environment. We decided to drive around off campus and capture footage of actual fast food restaurants, getting film of inside fast food restaurants and of menus, drive-ins, and various other things. We came up with the idea instead of having the ending be sad and showing a graveyard, we changed the ending to show the alternative to eating in fast food restaurants, the healthy side. So we showed clips of exercise equipment and healthy eating places to end the film with. The music that we added, one being a ridiculous and obnoxious song about different fast food places, and the other is the theme song to the show Biggest Loser to go along with the healthy section; this music really took our project to the next level.

Speaking of the musical aspect of our video, this is where we found the most difficult of our project to be at. We found this videos on Youtube, but then had to convert them to mp3's so that we could download and import the songs into Final Cut Pro. We decided that by just combining two different songs to our video it would sound better than all of our laughing and talking while we were filming. However we were unsure of what website and how to convert these videos so that they could be imported. We finally figured it out and cut down the songs to the parts that we wanted and the short film really came together nicely!

Istanbul Film- On Campus Event 2

This event was actually very entertaining as well as informative. The film featured was Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul; it explored the various genres of music in Turkey and explained the culture of music that they have. The narrator Alexander Hacke travels throughout Istanbul visiting and recording songs with different music. He described earlier in the film that the people of Istanbul didn't know what their music was until the age of 19; around then people began to realized the their country brings music from the west and the east and twists the music around to give the sound of Istanbul. What I noticed about their music is that the lyrics did not make sense, and the only real genre that had lyrics that did make sense was ironically the rap music. I say ironically because in America, rap music is looked at as just words and rabbling. A lot of things that they did include in their lyrics were things about their city, Istanbul. They often sang about their beautiful city, which is much different from our lyrics in America. Overall this was an excelent film about music of differnt cultures and opened my eyes to the different types of music genres across the world.