Write-Up for January 25th

The most challenging aspect of this assignment for me was part A: Have confidence in your vision of the world. It's difficult for me to talk about myself on a somewhat personal level to a group of people, even if I know most of those people. The difficulty laid in deciding what to present about myself that I don't think is too personal; I don't want to feel vulnerable. Though, in a sense, that vulnerability is a prime example of the inner struggles I will make mention of; untangling my self-perception from how I think others perceive me. The first two prompts were the ones I was more weary of, since I couldn't think of anything off hand. I spent a couple of days thinking about it. For one thing, I feel that I've lived a blessed enough life that I never experienced a significant amount of conflict, but again, that's my perception of my life. A family member may think of several instances I wouldn't have as formative conflicts. The first one was just hard because although I can easily think of personal peculiarities, I couldn't readily imagine anything that stood out any more than anybody else's. For the first two, I had to get suggestions/evaluations from my mom because I felt I needed that sort of outside viewpoint to guide my 'self-searching'. Equally difficult, was that once I got my information, I had trouble summarizing it satisfactorily; I don't want to leave anything out, but I have a tendency to talk too much plus stage jitters, which make that tendency worse.
          Part B was interesting because I was excited about watching a clip in order to evaluate its structure in relation to the theme of the piece. However, I was unsure of how to evaluate them without a proscribed temple, but I began to enjoy that liberty, since I should know how to evaluate. "Meshes in the Afternoon" confused me, and at first I took issue with that because I'm linear plot-oriented, until an exchange with a peer made me realize that maybe it's supposed to confuse me. She suggested that it's experimental, and that made it clear to me. The way "Meshes in the Afternoon" is shot intrigues me the most, of the four, particularly because of the sound effects, occasional non-traditional background music, and the choice of what to leave out of the frame, selection of extreme and medium close-ups and the disorienting camera angles in a couple of parts in the sequence.

Young Adults' Interactions with Media (Section 1)

Since I'm always ranting about young people and how much time they spend with media, especially social media, and since I'm always complaining about the sorry state of movie theater attendance and non-Internet connected television set usage, I am finally going to start gathering eclectic "research". Although, I assure you the articles I'll link to will be from sources I deem trustworthy, I am not writing a paper or any other such formal endeavor, hence the quotation marks around research.

Hopefully, if I find myself in another one of my 'rants turned to debates' situations, I won't be talking out the side of my neck. And, hopefully, any stats I gather will both correct my preconceived notions and ascertain and support some of my assumptions (because even though I'm never absolutely right, I'm never absolutely wrong either). Then again, who is? That's a rhetorical question, please don't ponder it.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/12/radioheads-how-students-listen-to-music/

dancing clips via YouTube

Stylistic Reference: Ti Watching a Hippopotamus Hunt

If I choose to run with a complete Egyptian style composition, I will use Ti Watching a Hippopotamus Hunt as my reference. Of course, I'm not going to copy it; I will probably deviate from it, since an artist's take on anything naturally embodies something of that artist. The main purpose of this reference is actually the treatment of space on a two-dimensional surface. Again, my animation is not a copy of this space, but would merely be informed by it. (That way, I wouldn't be accused of drawing off the top of my head or pulling something out of my nose at the last minute.) I've had this particular artwork in mind, as a reference, for a couple of weeks now.

Collage Animation Resource

After chatting briefly with a classmate, I brought up my home to describe some trees (I changed my subject to a dry land nature scene), and I decided to do some image searching for general Mississippi 'treescapes'. So, I'm thinking of using tree types and a other general land properties to compose my setting. As I know, even the best imagined scenes are not composed off the top of one's head. I need pictorial references, so I'll place those in a folder on my desktop. Here, is where I'll collect links to articles about my home state's land that I find relevant.

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/ar/archive/jul09/fungus0709.htm

http://msucares.com/crops/soils/

http://jeffreysmithart.com/cloudy-day-on-the-mississippi-river-plein-air-painting-on-the-rivers-edge/

Also, I would like to express a student's indebtedness to common license images and non-copyrighted image references for personal use. I would particularly like to thank the generosity of blog sites, which allow you to use images for non-commercial, non-copyright infringing projects, as they now so often comprise such a large percentage of Google Image search results.

I'll also throw this link in:

http://federaltwist.blogspot.com/2009/12/mississippi-delta-landscape-reading.html

Octupi (from YouTube)

I don't know why YouTube has to be at the forefront of everything, but you have to do what you have to do.