Final Project

This is my final video project. For this I went through a couple interesting ideas before setting on a "day in the life" video with a bit of a twist. I decided to see how often water makes its way through my life. Turns out it comes up a lot more often than I thought.

I edited the clips together in a quick style, with a few water related filters thrown in. I didn't use a lot of transitions because I liked the random cut style to show the different situations water was being used.

For the sound, I took the natural sound from the footage and boosted it and edited it within Soundtrack Pro. Using the Reverb effect and various other pitch effects I was able to make some really cool noises.

There are certain parts with no noise, I did this on purpose because I really wanted the water noise to tie with the visual of water being used. So where theres no water, there's no noise.

Waafa Bilal

Waafa Bilal

Waafa Bilal is an Iraqi artist who is also an art professor. I had previously seen some of his work in other classes, but was really intrigued by his Shoot an Iraqi exhibition. This interactive exhibit involved him locking himself in an apartment with a remote controlled paintball gun that can be fired over the internet.

                

          The concept of this work is very interesting, and I think it shows a few things about our current society and culture. This is a person who is of the same ethnicity of those our country is at war with right now. This obviously gives it a very strange aspect where you’re allowed to shoot at someone. Also this shows our culture and making decisions to shoot someone and actually cause them pain remotely from the safety of your home.

               

      I thought he spoke about a lot of interesting points regarding war, racism and stereotypes. His work can obviously be seen as controversial but I think it actually has some real quality and merit to whats behind it. 

Morgan McAuslan Exhibit

Morgan McAuslan

This thing was cool. This exhibition by Morgan McAuslan had his windmills set up in the center of the room, and a wall sculpture with motorized hammers that spun to hit various metal objects to create some cool noises and stuff.

It was cool that the artist was there and kind of discussed his thought process. I enjoyed this because so often I wonder how these people possibly come up with some of these ideas. Finding out first hand from the artist how his inspiration happens was pretty cool.

I liked his style of using found objects to create instruments (and the different noises being put at random making new music) and his use of various sizes and shapes which made the sound really have a variety of styles, pitches and tones. He also did a great job of actually putting some artistic style into the sculptures making them pretty cool to look at.

I enjoyed this because I always like seeing things used for something different than their original intended use, and this was an awesome example of taking something and using it in a completely different way.

Miss Representation

Miss Representation

            Going into this documentary, I was pretty skeptical, mainly because of my views on this type of feminism. I’ve always been very defensive of the media, and as a business, portraying things that are responded to well, especially females. However the opening parts when young girls are talking about what it is like to be a girl and one of the girls talked about her sister cutting herself because people make fun of her body was sad. One of the quotes that stuck out to me is that you can’t be what you can’t see. When you are deciding what you want to be when you grow up its true that girls don’t think of being political leaders or CEOs. However, the media shouldn’t be blamed as such a large influence. I mean look at me, as a man growing up, the media shows athletes, action heroes, firemen, etc. Does that automatically mean I want to grow up to be that? If so, is it truly the media’s fault? Furthermore, look at men in the media, every role model type man in the media has a square chin, expensive clothes, a nice car, and a six pack (one exception, the “sitcom” star who is usually overweight and funny, with a hot wife). Yet, I’m not complaining about how the media portrays men. I’m not blaming the media for my potential low self esteem.

            One of my favorite quotes in this film came from Michael Eisner, Disney’s CEO, who says: "We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. We are here to make money."  Being in the media industry, I agree with this. Television, advertising, entertainment, is a business. Sex sells, attractiveness sells, and that’s what most people want. That’s why everyone will talk about a sex scene starring Brad Pitt instead of one starring Danny DeVito. At the end of the day, it’s a business, and that’s the motivation.

            On the female political note I found it disgusting what some of the talk show hosts and other media figures had to say, the quote about Hilary Clinton was only being a runner in the Democratic Party because her husband messed around. That is just ridiculous. She has contributed way more than that and then for her status to be dwindled done to nothing but that statement is completely invalid.

            Overall I thought that the documentary was better than I first anticipated, however I feel like the movement and arguments need to get more concise. They throw a lot of statistics out there about how women are so influenced in a negative way, such as how something like 75% of girls hate their body by their teenage years, yet the argument seems to be more about the fight for equality and rights as opposed to strictly image. I agree with this in the political and business aspect, but the appearance and sexualized aspect I have a harder time siding with. 

Audio

Random Audio

Random by Elliott S


Edited Audio

Assignment 1 by Elliott S

Tryptic Video

This is my tryptic video project, this video is meant to show 3 different aspects of my life as a college student. Partying, School, and Football. The audio is switched around to show how different my weeks are from my weekends. I had fun making this, hope you enjoy.

Video Proposal

For my video I’m planning on using a lot of water related imagery, as I feel like that would fit the tone and theme of my audio track the most. Given the water noises, as well as the submarine noise, I think I could make a really cool video using some found footage from movies involving submarines (the Abyss, Hunt For Red October, Das Boot, etc).

I think using a small screen, such as the iPhone, to create this video will give me a lot of freedom and cool ideas for how to use the audio to tie with the video and create that sense of claustrophobic tension that is generally a staple of the idea of being in a submarine. This can end up changing the tone of my audio to make it a bit more unsettling, something that I never really saw in it the first few times I listened to the track.

Adding the end of the random track to the end of the composed track will also give it a musical quality which I think could end up being totally awesome and unexpected in context of the rest of the composition. I may try to tie some video footage there that would emphasize the musical direction that it takes, maybe some type of turntable footage or something similar to really make that part stand out a lot more than other parts of the video, since it’s my favorite part. I’m having trouble really finding any video artists that inspire me on this level, since I can’t really find any video artists that I like, but here are a couple links of video art I found interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJQmV8aPNao

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8X_pLvyk9U&feature=related

Audio Self Portraits

Ordered
http://soundcloud.com/elliott-s/assignment-1

Random
http://soundcloud.com/elliott-s/random

Mini Golf Hole

 So here's the final golf hole. I'm pretty proud of it. I had trouble with the Mario pepakura so I decided to use just Mario objects instead, namely the blocks and the warp pipe. I had always planned to have the warp pipe be the hole, but in order to make it to actually go into the pipe would require me to make the course ramp up to the pipe and you wouldn't really be able to see it, so instead I decided to just cut a space so you could shoot right into the pipe.

I wanted the blocks to appear to be floating as they do in the game, and tried a few different methods to achieve this, however they never would stay, so I decided a backboard with a Mario cloud theme would look cool as well as provide me with some easy way to hold the blocks up. And there you have it. The best golf hole in the Mushroom Kingdom

JoAnne Northrup

JoAnne Northrup is the Curator of the Nevada Museum of Art and she had a lecture about Leo Villareal, the artist of the exhibit we had previously seen. It was interesting hearing more about him after seeing his work. This is where we learned about his Burning Man experience and how he got himself a bit lost on the playa, and was inspired to create a work of art to put on top of his van to serve a double purpose, an art instillation, as well as a guiding beacon should he get lost again. She focused mainly on him and his past moreso than specifics about his art, for example, I found it interesting that she said he was first inspired by light art while in Venice.

It's definitely interesting to learn about the background of an artist after seeing his work. It makes you look at his work in a different light after knowing how he got to where he is now 

Leo Villareal

Dan Conroy and myself attended the Leo Villareal exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art. This is a pretty interesting guy. Apparently he went to Burning Man back in the 90's and got inspired by all the art there. Also, apparently he got a bit lost out in the desert and had trouble finding his van. He decided that he would create a digital light sculpture/animation to help himself find his way back to his van. Now he's a digital artist who creates really interesting light shows using many different types of lighting and animations

The exhibit was pretty cool, he had a lot of his different pieces there including my favorite Star. Star was one of the first pieces you saw upon entering and is basically a huge circular steel frame with blinking and flashing lights all attached to it that moved in and out at different times and speeds, and at one point even looked like it was "breathing." He had a cool American Flag one too that was a bit more "traditional" that was made out of different colored fluorescent tubes. I thought it was cool the way he used not only different techniques, but also different sources of light and motion to make every one of his pieces feel truly unique and exciting.

I thought this exhibit was cool and way different than anything I've seen at the Nevada Museum of Art. It looked more like something I would have expected to see at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, or at Coachella, or yes, I suppose Burning Man.

Mini Golf Hole 1st draft

For my golf hole I wanted to do a mario theme, with the warp pipe as the hole. I want mario characters on the hole itself, and I used sketch up to make a very simple mock up of the hole. When I make it in real life, I plan on having more characters to make up for the simplicity of the hole.

Barbara London

Barbara London was at Nevada to judge one of the student exhibits, she is a curator for the Museum of Modern Art and works with digital arts which made her lecture very interesting and relevant for students like us.

I liked the structure of her lecture, because she presented it as kind of a crash course in technologic art history. By starting with how artist would take the technology they had at their disposal at the time (for example, photos, video, computers, etc) and bringing it up to the present,

She talked a lot about Nam June Paik whom I had learned a bit about in other classes, it was interesting to see more of his work and how interactivity played a huge role in all of his pieces. As a huge David Bowie fan, it was also cool to see some of his work in there too, because I wasn't really expecting that.

The Residents was also interesting, how they could work on anything without a copyright, I found that similar to a lot of music artists I listen to such as Girl Talk and Super Mash Bros which are musical mash up artists who take a lot of different songs and mash them up into one track. I like that aspect of using whatever you have to create something totally new.

Overall I enjoyed the lecture and thought it actually tied into what we've been working on pretty well, especially with the progression of technology and how it's constantly creating a new medium for artists

Pepakura Object

My first time trying to do Pepakura wasn't too successful, but after making this one I felt like I could do something a lot better next time. I made an iPad, since i had just gotten one and wanted to see how close I could make them look. I tried to give it more depth but it was harder than I thought (since they're so thin anyways). But I ended up being able to give it some depth, more visible from the back, much like the real iPad.

Sketch up 3D modeling part 1 and 2

For the 3D modeling assignment, I decided to create a soccer ball but make it different by using the fill tool to pattern the white part like grass. The ball itself wasn't very hard after i figured out how to make the lines. it took a while to get used to the program but after I did i enjoyed creating a few different things. I also made a simple pool by just creating a rectangle and using the fill tool to make the side wood paneled and the top water




For my sculpture I decided to just start with an object and see what I ended up with. I started with the birdhouse and noticed because of the size and the roof coming out the sides it looked like a ship or something. So I decided to go with that and see what I could add to it. The turbine engines were my first thought and after attaching those to the undersides of the "wings" I noticed the perch on the front was a bit small and lacking, so I used the pull tool to make it larger and found a mounted gattling gun that fit on it perfectly. Lastly, I decided to make the front brick as a defense option.

This idea was just funny to me because I can imagine this thing whipping around the air terrorizing birds who treated it badly.

Machinima Music Video

For this project. Me and Dan Conroy teamed up to make a music video to one of our favorite songs from our childhood, none other than Jump by Kris Kross. We decided to shoot in a strip club, to fit with the music video theme. We ran into a few troubles (apparently they frown upon shirtless guys in sunglasses dancing on the stage ) but otherwise we had a great time filming it and got some good shots out of it.

Art & the Avatar

1.) What are some of the advantages/disadvantages to creating an Avatar that looks extremely similar to your own personal appearance?

2.) How can an avatar be used as an art tool, or in what ways can modern digital art use avatars to further connect people on a digital level?

Second Life Performance Preposal

For my performance idea, I thought it would be cool for us to all dress stereotypically as a different time period or decade. For example, I'm dressed as somewhat of a "greaser" from the 50's, but it would be cool if we all walked around in a group of different time period people (20's vaudvillian, 30's gangster, 60's hippie, 80's businessman etc)

Second Life Object

 This is my second life object. It looks simple but definitely wasn't! I made a wall (ok well that part was simple) but I decided to play around with different building effects to make something new. So I used the hollow tool to create a opening within the wall, now I had a window but I wanted to make it a bit more realistic than that. So , making another prim I made it the same size as the hole, then adjusted the transparency to make it look like glass, then i moved that into the hollow area of the wall, added a texture, and now I have a real working window (it even catches sunlight differently and gives off reflections) moving the two prims in line was definitely the hardest part of this project.

Second Life Self Portrait

So, this didn't work too well, I eventually figured out that my problem was the sides of my face got way too bumpy which caused the front to kinda get stretched and make me look like Sloth from the Goonies. Next time I need to figure out how to use the clone stamp tool better to make my edges more smooth and get those side textures a lot more do able.

Digital Nation

Digital Nation is a FRONTLINE expose on modern societies increase in usage of technology, and more specifically how it affects our culture. I thought the beginning was pretty interesting, when all the students were discussing how much they multitask with their technology, how they can be talking to a friend, while checking their phones, and e-mailing a professor. I definitely identified with that, because a majority of the time, I'm listening to music, on facebook, and texting, even while talking to my friends. However, I think multitasking can work in a way, obviously some distractions can't be done while trying to pay attention, I think that in our current technological culture, multitasking is inevitable.

I also found the part about relationships in the digital age interesting too, because again, I've personally noticed how my relationships with people have changed with technology, for example, how there's certain people I only text, or only chat with online, and other people I always talk to in person, and how there's a big difference with those relationships.  I also thought the gaming relationships part was interesting and it reminded me of that video we watched earlier in the semester about the World Of Warcraft players who started healthy, real life, relationships.

Overall this documentary was pretty interesting, and I feel gave good insight into the modern world and how our access to technology has affected our daily lives and culture.

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