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.

Day 2 of Film Project

In class on Wednesday me and Tammy learned how to capture our film from the tape/ deck and put it into Final Cut Pro, from there we broke what we have of our project so far and make about 9 sub-clips. The film footage that we broke apart was of us driving and looking at all the restaurants on the road to actually walking into McDonald's and filming their menu. From where we are now we are on track but need to get more footage to capture and add to what we have now so that we can start to piece together our film.

THINK BIG- On Campus Event 1

The THINK BIG Innovation & Media featuring Deborah Acklin, the president of WQED and Diane Block, the co-publisher of the Post-Gazette. The moderator for this was Lauren Head; she asked the two panelists about four or five questions about how they are media is changing and affecting their business. It was very interesting to listen to how media is affecting a newspaper company, being that it was an old form a media. They what each of their companies is doing to adapt to the new technologies to keep up with business. I noticed that it related to convergence culture even in business because these companies had to learn to how to reach out to different audiences through different forms of media. One of the major things that struck me when I was listening to them speak was when they talked about social networking. Diana Block said that "social networking is changing communications," by breaking the borders of geography. I never looked at social media that way before and it was interesting to here Facebook and Twitter being used in that context before. Block said that she they are able to reach a more diverse amount of people which would help increase their audience which would increase sales. After attending this event, it really sparked my mind to think about how much influence entrepreneurship and media have to do with business.

Day One

In class yesterday, I came up with the idea of a technology environment. My idea was to show how our technology has changed from the first telephone all the way up to the iPad. I then drew out all the different types of technologies that I could think of in between. When we met with our partners me and Tammy compared our projects. Tammy's project was about fast food environment and wanted to show how much fast food is present in our world today. She showed me her storyboard and we came up with some other ideas that we both thought would really add to the project and somewhat make it comical without losing the serious tone. We came up with driving down a busy street with many fast food restaurants on it and zooming in here and there, then another thing that we came up with was to show a map of the world with the number of fast food restaurants listed for each one, also we came up with a way to incorporate local fast food restaurants as well. We brainstormed really well together and we look forward to getting out there and start filming.

Response to Pictures [2]

After looking over the rest of the blogs I chose Karla's last picture of a driveway covered by leaves and branches. I picked this picture because it has very good line, color, and mass. The lines of the driveway lead you up to the what I'm assuming is the garage door of a house; but because the of the mass amount of leaves and bushes covering the house it makes the background hard to see with lets the mind interpret what we are seeing. To me it looks like a secret doorway and caught my attention as soon as i scrolled down to the picture. the overwhelming amount of green foliage in the picture really pops and gives you many dimensions of green. This picture is simply just someone's driveway but the way in which this was photographed really changes the way someone looks at this picture.

Sonjia's last picture titled Dead But Alive really interested me. When I first saw this picture it seemed simple and perfect and ultimately beautiful. The color was just radiant and crisp and clear, the color seemed to jump off the page and showed the detail of the flower and the leaves so well. In terms of ikebana, I believe detail and flowers being radiant is very important. When I scrolled down and read her description I was shocked to read this is was a fake flower on fake leaves. I thought how could this flower be so perfect to almost being too perfect. It really stood out to me when she said this is representing something that is alive and that is real, but yet it is very much dead or fake. And that I think was our number one concern with the ikebana demonstration, because they were suppose to represent life by plucking flowers and killing them to put it bluntly.

Both pictures I found to demonstrate line, color, and mass extremely well. They both used the techniques that ikebana said for and that is why I choose these two photos.

Response to Pictues [1]

The first picture that I chose was a picture from Zenebou. She took a picture that represented movement, she said that she spinned around in a circle to capture that element. I also thought that by taking the picture in a Dutch Angle shot, it also added to the abstract picture. This picture was very visually interesting and kept you looking. At first when you look at the picture you can't really tell that it's grass, or it doesn't appear to look like grass. It almost looks like a paint brush making lines across the picture. It really captures the element of movement throughout the picture very well, and it relates to the Sogetsu because it is simply grass, but changed into something beautiful and turns into a real art form.

The second picture that I saw was from Stephy. It was her picture titled 7/3 and had the purple and white flowers in it. The flowers are all connected but they are spaced apart from one another and if you look closely its almost as if each individual flower doesn't touch one another. When I saw this photo, to me it looked like these flowers could be used for an ikebana display. This picture captured the element of space throughout a ikebana display and that is why this picture really got my attention. She said that in the demonstration they talked about having a 7/3 ratio in the arrangement and this picture is a PERFECT example of that. You can clearly tell that the white flowers are the 7 and the purple flowers are the 3 in the ratio. Another thing she mentioned was openness, and by looking at the photo, you can see the flowers are spread apart from one another naturally, unlike flower arrangements that are bunched together.

Overall both of these pictures represent ikebana and the concepts presented with composition extremely well. They both capture two different but important elements and are crucial to the art of ikebana, space(openness) and simplicity. Each photo looks like ikebana in picture form.

Unity there is Strength

Sogetsu Assignment Replacement:Political Event

When I went to this event, the two women running the event said that they could not find the video "One Women, One Vote." So instead the showed the movie "Street Fights," which was about the election race between Cory Booker and Sharpe James running for Newark, New Jersey mayor in 2002. These are the ten things that I came up with after watching this film:

1. Determination
2. Change requires actions
3. Creating a Renaissance
4. Substance over symbols
5. Rising from ashes
6. In "unity there is strength."
7. "But like dust still I rise..." Maya Angelo
8. The color of politics/ the influence that race still plays in society today
9. Spirits
10. Influence over people

Convergence Culture

Convergence culture basically is the way in which we presents news through different forms of media. In the article it says that, "the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold..." This means that the people of the United States saw the impacts of September 11th differently than the people of Iraq and Iran... through the way the media presented it. Each news channel can tell a story differently and the bits of information that we get from each channel forms the ultimate story to us.

Personally I have seen convergence culture work through the effects of newspapers. Not many people carry around newspapers any more, instead while people wait at the bus stop they take our their Blackberry phones and download the latest news. However newspaper business still continue to print thousands and thousands of newspaper a day to put on peoples front porches, the impact of the newspaper from just a few years back is changing rather quickly. Back when Internet was not accessible through our phones and even back farther than that when Internet didn't even exist, the newspaper was the primary source for news. And to take it one step further even before television the newspaper was the only source for news.

This change in culture to having the luxury of downloading the news on our cell phone in just a few seconds has evolved the technology and the media world. This example of the way media was presented before shows, how new/media has transformed and is still being told through those many different forms of media. The way in which news is presented to the public is still going to get changing and updated and moving forward. Being able to get the news on your phone, in five... ten years, is going to be a thing of the past, and the thought of a actual newspaper will be unheard of to that generation.