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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)