Saturday, March 5, 2011
Can we pretend that these shorts are a hamburger? (Blog 10a)
First read this:
David Rendall's Freak Factor
What you just read was David Rendall’s “Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness”. Basically within this short, self-motivational reading Rendall explains how everyone has strengths and weaknesses; it is only natural. He also expresses his theories on how strengths and weaknesses are directly related and how he thinks they must be balanced. I think that Rendall definitely is onto something, for starters, he lists out a bunch of strengths and weaknesses that he claims are directly correlated and he seems to be right on target. He links creativity with disorganization, organization with inflexibility, and flexibility with inconsistency; all of these characteristics often seem to coincide, and I’m sure I’m not the only one that agrees. Throughout the reading you notice one continuous pattern of Rendall telling the reader NOT to concentrate on their weaknesses and to focus on their strengths; if they do the opposite, they will balance out the weaknesses and the strengths to be just one giant ball of mediocre flesh that doesn’t really stand out in any good or bad fashion. I really liked the metaphor that Rendall used to portray what he meant by using K-Mart, Target, and Wal-Mart as his examples of different people have different strengths (Target has quality, Wal-Mart has low price), and those that don’t accept their weaknesses end up developing only weaknesses, e.g. K-Mart, the company that shot for quality and low price, just met customer expectations half way and went bankrupt. I thought that was a very accurate and interesting analogy. Now I will go over three of these nine suggestions Rendall gives the reader that I personally enjoy and heavily agree with.
I really like his second suggestion. He basically lists out all of the flaws that he’s ever been called out on by his wife, his kids, his co-workers, his friends, his neighbors, and anyone he’s ever met; he then takes all of these flaws and turns them into positive qualities. He said, “his apparent flaws were clues to his true strengths.” With this positive outlook, Rendall became the powerful, successful, unique man that he is today: a professor, speaker, and consultant. No longer would someone who is known as the hyperactive guy have to be the hyperactive guy, now he gets paid to stand up and talk. I like how he simply says the guy who can’t work in teams simply works alone. Some people force others who already work well alone to work in teams and sometimes it can hinder their work. This isn’t at all a stab at the class I enjoyed working in teams. Hahaha. I pretty much like this suggestion because I personally typically like to remain positive regardless of how bad the situation, and he turns weaknesses with a negative connotation into strengths with a positive sound to them.
Next I enjoy his suggestion to build on one’s strengths. This also includes accepting one’s weaknesses. The fifth suggestion talks about foundation and focusing on improving yourself by increasing what you’re already good at. One of the best points he makes in this paragraph is “It feels good. It is enjoyable and energizing to work on your strengths,” and he’s right. What’s the point in doing something you don’t like? When you don’t like what you’re doing not only are you hindering your happiness, your improvement rate slows to a crawl, and you neglect and perhaps even weaken your strengths. Someone whose good at football shouldn’t go spend all of their time trying to improve their terrible skills on the piano because eventually they will have learned very little on the piano and lost a great deal of strength and muscle memory that helped them be so good at football.
Finally, I like the third suggestion: Flawless, There’s Nothing Wrong With You. This is the section where Rendall goes over the linked strengths and weaknesses: creativity comes with disorganization; organization comes with inflexibility; self-confidence comes with arrogance, and so on. All of these are very accurate, I’m sure that anyone that reads any of these qualities can either relate by evaluating himself or herself or someone they know. No one has every quality, there must be balance, and in order for there to be balance, we all must have some flaw.
What have I found my strengths and weaknesses to be pertaining to the creative process? I don’t really know what you mean by the creative process. I know that I’m confident, so naturally people think that I’m arrogant even though I try to portray myself has humble. But inside I am confident, and it helps me get by. I am always positive. I like to tell people that if they’re not positive, things that happen to them will more than likely be not positive, but because this is how I am it also makes me kind of unrealistic, but I think it pays off. I’m also told that I’m creative and I like to think that I am. Something that reinforces this is this article and how disorganized I am. My desk looks like an explosion and the icons in my computer are meshed together in one giant mess. This is a problem though because when you’re in film, well at least this quarter I’m taking 419 working on a thirty-minute short film as a digital imaging technician, which basically revolves around being 100% organized. Ironically, some things within the creative world require major organization, if I mess up the organization of the files even slightly, I’ll probably get reamed for it.
Conclusive paragraph.
David Rendall's Freak Factor
What you just read was David Rendall’s “Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness”. Basically within this short, self-motivational reading Rendall explains how everyone has strengths and weaknesses; it is only natural. He also expresses his theories on how strengths and weaknesses are directly related and how he thinks they must be balanced. I think that Rendall definitely is onto something, for starters, he lists out a bunch of strengths and weaknesses that he claims are directly correlated and he seems to be right on target. He links creativity with disorganization, organization with inflexibility, and flexibility with inconsistency; all of these characteristics often seem to coincide, and I’m sure I’m not the only one that agrees. Throughout the reading you notice one continuous pattern of Rendall telling the reader NOT to concentrate on their weaknesses and to focus on their strengths; if they do the opposite, they will balance out the weaknesses and the strengths to be just one giant ball of mediocre flesh that doesn’t really stand out in any good or bad fashion. I really liked the metaphor that Rendall used to portray what he meant by using K-Mart, Target, and Wal-Mart as his examples of different people have different strengths (Target has quality, Wal-Mart has low price), and those that don’t accept their weaknesses end up developing only weaknesses, e.g. K-Mart, the company that shot for quality and low price, just met customer expectations half way and went bankrupt. I thought that was a very accurate and interesting analogy. Now I will go over three of these nine suggestions Rendall gives the reader that I personally enjoy and heavily agree with.
I really like his second suggestion. He basically lists out all of the flaws that he’s ever been called out on by his wife, his kids, his co-workers, his friends, his neighbors, and anyone he’s ever met; he then takes all of these flaws and turns them into positive qualities. He said, “his apparent flaws were clues to his true strengths.” With this positive outlook, Rendall became the powerful, successful, unique man that he is today: a professor, speaker, and consultant. No longer would someone who is known as the hyperactive guy have to be the hyperactive guy, now he gets paid to stand up and talk. I like how he simply says the guy who can’t work in teams simply works alone. Some people force others who already work well alone to work in teams and sometimes it can hinder their work. This isn’t at all a stab at the class I enjoyed working in teams. Hahaha. I pretty much like this suggestion because I personally typically like to remain positive regardless of how bad the situation, and he turns weaknesses with a negative connotation into strengths with a positive sound to them.
Next I enjoy his suggestion to build on one’s strengths. This also includes accepting one’s weaknesses. The fifth suggestion talks about foundation and focusing on improving yourself by increasing what you’re already good at. One of the best points he makes in this paragraph is “It feels good. It is enjoyable and energizing to work on your strengths,” and he’s right. What’s the point in doing something you don’t like? When you don’t like what you’re doing not only are you hindering your happiness, your improvement rate slows to a crawl, and you neglect and perhaps even weaken your strengths. Someone whose good at football shouldn’t go spend all of their time trying to improve their terrible skills on the piano because eventually they will have learned very little on the piano and lost a great deal of strength and muscle memory that helped them be so good at football.
Finally, I like the third suggestion: Flawless, There’s Nothing Wrong With You. This is the section where Rendall goes over the linked strengths and weaknesses: creativity comes with disorganization; organization comes with inflexibility; self-confidence comes with arrogance, and so on. All of these are very accurate, I’m sure that anyone that reads any of these qualities can either relate by evaluating himself or herself or someone they know. No one has every quality, there must be balance, and in order for there to be balance, we all must have some flaw.
What have I found my strengths and weaknesses to be pertaining to the creative process? I don’t really know what you mean by the creative process. I know that I’m confident, so naturally people think that I’m arrogant even though I try to portray myself has humble. But inside I am confident, and it helps me get by. I am always positive. I like to tell people that if they’re not positive, things that happen to them will more than likely be not positive, but because this is how I am it also makes me kind of unrealistic, but I think it pays off. I’m also told that I’m creative and I like to think that I am. Something that reinforces this is this article and how disorganized I am. My desk looks like an explosion and the icons in my computer are meshed together in one giant mess. This is a problem though because when you’re in film, well at least this quarter I’m taking 419 working on a thirty-minute short film as a digital imaging technician, which basically revolves around being 100% organized. Ironically, some things within the creative world require major organization, if I mess up the organization of the files even slightly, I’ll probably get reamed for it.
Conclusive paragraph.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Pepperidge Farm Remembers (blog 9a)
I’m going to be quite honest here, my group and I didn’t really put our best effort into this presentation and I’m sure it showed. We got together on Tuesday, put forth all of our ideas that most of us didn’t really think about in the first place, picked one, and then decided to just roll with whatever came out of our heads on Thursday night. We probably spent a total of two or maybe three hours on this project total, which is probably the bare minimum of time spent compared to previous projects work duration. You can’t really blame us though, it was just a power point and most of the group members weren’t digital media majors. Also I’m pretty positive that most of the class has been so creatively drained over the past nine weeks that our next project would probably ironically be the most bland, drab thing we’ve ever made.
Anyway, this is way off topic; let’s get on track. Our game was based on a really cool story that we surprisingly neglected to express during our presentation. We had discussed and based everything in the presentation off of this story, yet we never actually told the foundation of all of the game’s features and qualities. The game, The Gestalt Principal, was made to scare the living daylights out of anyone who played it. The story begins as you wake up in a room, unaware of your surroundings, probably because it is so dark and your vision is extremely blurred. Sounds you hear and barely backlit silhouettes that you see indicate that you are in some sort of tropical forested area. Throughout the game you are to find your way out, learn of your surroundings, and find out why and how you ended up in this situation. If you somehow survive amongst all of the crazed, flesh-hungry monsters, maintain your sanity and your constantly wavering health, and find the glass wall at the edge of this realm you’ve come to realize has been your home for several months, you finally find the truth behind this nightmare: that you were somehow captured and placed inside of a giant glass bubble as the subject of a test for highly classified scientific research. How do you get out? Well. That would be a good place to cut off so that you can buy the next game. The Gestalt Principal: Vote for Hilary, where the second half of your character’s story is revealed.
A huge chunk of what was in the paragraph that you just read was not included within our presentation. We didn’t mention the glass bubble, we didn’t mention the scientific experiment, and we didn’t give the character any personality or connect it to the audience very well. We did however explain in very great detail everything that wasn’t part of the story, but rather the gameplay and how the game felt and looked overall. This is something we did very well by explaining the physics of the game (mechanics), the general goals and objectives of the game, the movement as well as the perspective of the game, the system on which the game would be played, how the controller layouts would look, how the interface would look as well as help the player understand his surroundings and current situation (health meters, mini maps, etc.), we defined various simple, yet mandatory rules of the game, and we went through an eclectic collection of different visual and audible guides that are placed throughout the game.
Overall I think our presentation wasn’t bad, but it could have been a lot better. We didn’t prepare who was going to say what either… So that was a mistake.
Anyway, this is way off topic; let’s get on track. Our game was based on a really cool story that we surprisingly neglected to express during our presentation. We had discussed and based everything in the presentation off of this story, yet we never actually told the foundation of all of the game’s features and qualities. The game, The Gestalt Principal, was made to scare the living daylights out of anyone who played it. The story begins as you wake up in a room, unaware of your surroundings, probably because it is so dark and your vision is extremely blurred. Sounds you hear and barely backlit silhouettes that you see indicate that you are in some sort of tropical forested area. Throughout the game you are to find your way out, learn of your surroundings, and find out why and how you ended up in this situation. If you somehow survive amongst all of the crazed, flesh-hungry monsters, maintain your sanity and your constantly wavering health, and find the glass wall at the edge of this realm you’ve come to realize has been your home for several months, you finally find the truth behind this nightmare: that you were somehow captured and placed inside of a giant glass bubble as the subject of a test for highly classified scientific research. How do you get out? Well. That would be a good place to cut off so that you can buy the next game. The Gestalt Principal: Vote for Hilary, where the second half of your character’s story is revealed.
A huge chunk of what was in the paragraph that you just read was not included within our presentation. We didn’t mention the glass bubble, we didn’t mention the scientific experiment, and we didn’t give the character any personality or connect it to the audience very well. We did however explain in very great detail everything that wasn’t part of the story, but rather the gameplay and how the game felt and looked overall. This is something we did very well by explaining the physics of the game (mechanics), the general goals and objectives of the game, the movement as well as the perspective of the game, the system on which the game would be played, how the controller layouts would look, how the interface would look as well as help the player understand his surroundings and current situation (health meters, mini maps, etc.), we defined various simple, yet mandatory rules of the game, and we went through an eclectic collection of different visual and audible guides that are placed throughout the game.
Overall I think our presentation wasn’t bad, but it could have been a lot better. We didn’t prepare who was going to say what either… So that was a mistake.
Monday, February 28, 2011
The Dog is Forever in the Pushup Position (mdia8b)
Here are the animations that my partner and I had to create in MDIA203
Matt Brody Created T-Storm:
I created ThunderThighs:
Yes I will admit, I cheated with the fire, however the rest was created in pencil. Frame by frame at 24p. The separate shapes were created in photoshop and then dragged into pencil as jpeg files and later animated. Here's the photoshop sketch of thunderthighs:
Currently, Jason Flood has nothing posted. I really don't feel like doing another one of these. It is Monday February 28th and there is nothing posted. If I should still be doing something let me know.
That is all.
Matt Brody Created T-Storm:
I created ThunderThighs:
Yes I will admit, I cheated with the fire, however the rest was created in pencil. Frame by frame at 24p. The separate shapes were created in photoshop and then dragged into pencil as jpeg files and later animated. Here's the photoshop sketch of thunderthighs:
The first person’s hero/villain characters I will be critiquing will be Eric Eaton’s “radio man” and his partner’s villain who shall not be named… because he has no name to my knowledge. Just to clarify any mistakes I make towards the creation of these characters… the blog only shows three pictures of what looks like three different sketches of characters with very little descriptive detail. I will be comparing and contrasting these two characters in terms of their distinct color schemes.
This is the hero:
His name is Radio Man. He has a very bright color scheme that really pops out to the audience. This is because of his clothing and accessories that vary in highly saturated as well as higher valued colors that consist of a generally split complementary color scheme with either various reds, oranges, and contrasting hues of blues, or greens, blue-greens, and contrasting bright reds. Because both of these color schemes are so bright and vivid with generally primary colors, the viewer sees the character as pleasant and safe: the qualities of someone one would associate with a hero. These colors contrast with this villain who I will name Bryan.
Bryan’s colors consist of low saturated browns, and extremely high valued and low saturated purples and bright blues. These colors don’t necessarily contrast with Radioman’s colors, however they are very dull, boring, and drab colors that are very “blown out” as colorists and light experts would call it, meaning they are so bright (just the purple), so saturated with white coloring that it looks like a strange shade of white. Usually this is very unappealing, such as for the case of this character: poop brown and very light purple are indeed very unappealing. At this point, the affinity within the bright blues and reds don’t even matter; they just make the ugly colors uglier. The fact that these faded out purples that I’m talking about are the character’s flesh makes all of this description worse. This may be somewhat subjective but to me, the skin color gives somewhat of an undead, creepy sort of feeling, and the characters skin looks like something you don’t want to be touched by, which is perfect considering this is the villain and it really helped me easily contrast between the two color schemes.
Next up is Chris Faust’s Villain.
There won’t be must contrasting here because there is no hero that I can see here. However I am going to deeply analyze this character’s rather interesting and well-portrayed movement. This villain, also nameless, not only displays the movement of a person, but also the movement of a skateboarder, as well as a villain… but mostly, a skateboarder. There are a lot of instances within this animation where the character performs an “ollie” or a type of “flip-trick,” the act of jumping on a skateboard that gives the animator the opportunity to demonstrate weight as well as squash and stretch. Within the instant of an ollie, a skateboarder must thrust down force with his back foot onto the tail of the skateboard in order to generate enough force to lift his body and himself off of the ground. As this is happening the skateboarder’s front foot should be using the skateboard’s grip tape to drag or pull the skateboard up even further as he bends his knees closer to his chest. After the skateboard and the skater’s body has reached its maximum height, the skater must make sure to continue to keep his back leg ever so slightly higher than his front leg so that he may clear anything that he is jumping over without catching the back wheels of the skateboard on the gapped (cleared) object. Within this animation, Johnny Hammersticks performs four or five different variations of this squash and stretch/weighted movement. There are also a lot of overlapping movements within the frame that follow through when Mr. Hammersticks either knocks a person over or blows their brains out, as he leaves them they continue to fall or bleed. Also as he falls his arms fold back, and his legs extend and his body follows through until he lands, at which point his motion changes, but continues to overlap with previous actions. All of these objective observations actively show the audience how fast and how skilled this villain is.
Currently, Jason Flood has nothing posted. I really don't feel like doing another one of these. It is Monday February 28th and there is nothing posted. If I should still be doing something let me know.
That is all.
The Dog is Forever in the Pushup Position
Here are the animations that my partner and I had to create in MDIA203
Matt Brody Created T-Storm:
I created ThunderThighs:
Yes I will admit, I cheated with the fire, however the rest was created in pencil. Frame by frame at 24p. The separate shapes were created in photoshop and then dragged into pencil as jpeg files and later animated. Here's the photoshop sketch of thunderthighs:
Matt Brody Created T-Storm:
I created ThunderThighs:
Yes I will admit, I cheated with the fire, however the rest was created in pencil. Frame by frame at 24p. The separate shapes were created in photoshop and then dragged into pencil as jpeg files and later animated. Here's the photoshop sketch of thunderthighs:
Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus? Or a really cool opotamus? (Blog 7a)
RIP Mitch Hedberg.
Here are the two short films we made in MDIA203. We weren’t allowed to use synchronous audio, anything better than a camera that shot 720p, camera movements, depth of field, or anything that an arrogant video production major like myself would love to be using. Well our groups ended up with two films as a result:
The first one where we took the 20’s silent film approach:
And the second one where we took a regular, nothing-special short film approach just with separately recorded audio:
The two are obviously extremely different in so many different ways I could quadruple the amount of required words for this assignment and still have things to talk about. Which is usually what I do anyway, so we’ll see how that goes. For the silent video we purposely incorporated a lot of subconscious lines, rhythms, and shapes by using precise lighting and art direction. Whereas in the second film, we didn’t really consider half as many lines and shapes, but concentrated more on space and movement within the frame. Within the very first frame of the silent film you may notice a mass amount of lines with a very staccato-oriented rhythm. Immediately your attention is quickly directed towards the main character through the diagonal lines within the woodwork of the bar, pointing directly at his head. Also within the same frame you may notice that a light was placed exactly where his head was, making this very bright and vibrant halo around his head, directing your attention towards him even further. I do realize that the light looks very dumb without a lampshade and it actually blows out that area of the screen due to the ISO settings of the camera, however it gets the point across. The very close, horizontal lines that the innumerable amount of liquor bottles display create a lot of rhythm enhancing the sped-up feel of an old silent film, as well as created many harsh dividing lines between the circular and hunched over protagonist and his straight-line hair, square shaped target that is nowhere near his reach, as if there is a giant wall between them. Not only do the contrast between their body and head shapes and all of these lines separate them, the line of the bar and the balance and symmetry of the frame tell the audience that they have something in common with each other; despite all of these subliminal dividers, perhaps they are on the exact same playing field. Really, the rest of the film barely concentrates on line and shape other than the establishment shot, other than perhaps the style of the clothes that the characters seamlessly change in and out of. When the protagonist imagines himself as a more confident self, he also seems to imagine his female accomplice as more attractive and in different clothes. The clothes she wears turns her into a round shaped person: well at least her hair, face, and accessories become more round-shaped. She is now the vulnerable one, and his clothing is more “geometric” I guess. It has more shape to it, it isn’t exactly square, but there are hard, rigid lines in triangles, pentagons, and squares throughout his vest and neck-tie garments. In his imagination he stands up taller and his body shape is much straighter and “square-er,” causing the viewer to understand even further that he wants to be this confident man, and that he wants to picture this lady as a timid, shy, and vulnerable female.
All of this that I just said highly contrasts with what we did within the second film where shapes and lines are barely intentionally acknowledged. We were geared more towards using movement and space within the frame. Throughout this entire film, we show the two characters on complete opposite sides of the screen (within reason regarding the rule of thirds). He was generally on the left, as she was on the right. At one point when he is eyeing her across from the coffee shop you see him lean out of the screen, accidentally too far out of the OTS shot, which I’ll turn into something valuable and say that he is so far away from her when he thinks about hitting on her that he is out of his mind, he is no where close to having any chance with this girl. At this point the viewer has subconsciously didactically accepted the fact that there is no way this guy is going to have a chance with this girl. The walking patterns that the two characters follow are very diagonal, creating virtual lines within the frame that subconsciously cause viewer tension, as if something is going to happen. I’ve heard and said multiple times within this blog that diagonal lines cause tension and strange feelings within the human mind subconsciously, it is the most action-oriented line. They weren’t very harsh lines, however if they were that would create more tension, which would be unnecessary. After this tension is built up, it is released with the girl throwing her book down with much faster movement than that of the rest of the film, which quickly allows the viewer to calm back down from this built up tension.
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