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