Digital Media Convergence

This page is an archive of my blog posts that have to do with the class I took in the spring of 2010, Digital Media Convergence.  It is about some learning some basic photoshop and final cut pro skills, as well as fostering some budding creativity.  Anyway, here is my body of work:

2-18-2010: The First Assignment

So DMC has begun, and it’s time for me to start blogging about it.  Some of these posts are required and some (like this one) are not.  But either way, it should be a lot of fun!

Our first photo assignment for Digital Media Convergence was to take 300 pictures.  Of anything.  A daunting task, yes, but an adventure in the making.

Initially, I explored my suite, finding little things that don’t usually get noticed.  We had some supports lying around from lofted beds, and I really liked the line heading down the side of this image.  I think the focus is a little off, and I might go reshoot this particular image, but I still like it.

So then I moved to my whiteboard and went crazy.  I call this particular image “The Artist’s Dilemma.”  Staring at the blank whiteboard, full of possibility, my mind went blank.  And then I started to get philosophical and wondered to myself, “Well, what am I supposed to create?”  So then I got this concept and just sort of ran with it.

I really like the sad irony of writing this quote on a whiteboard.  It’s a really beautiful quote from Angels in America, and I had just finished watching the HBO miniseries of the play.  A great film, by the way.

This is the last one from the assignment that I wanted to share.  I like it.  I’m not sure why I like it, but the colors intrigue me and the footprint is unusual.  It’s almost like stepping from fall into winter.  The other picture from this assignment is actually the header for the blog, so I don’t feel like you need to see it again.

Thanks for following along!

2-19-2010: Light and Shadow

Our second photo assignment was to notice light and shadow.  And to take 300 more pictures.  I didn’t want to just go out and take pictures of the sun shining and people’s shadows on the sidewalk, so I decided to be a little more experimental.  I decided to project moments from film onto my subjects.  The purpose was to show that film can express what we as humans are incapable of expressing at times (due to social constrictions and such).  I also played with light and shadow thematically, showing moments of desperation and triumph.  So here we go!

Okay so I lied.  The first pic is sort of unrelated.  It happened during the shoot, but I love this because, to me, it feels like an impressionist painting.  It’s a really gorgeous image of my friend Laurel, who you will see in a few more pics today.

So this is an obvious moment in film, but I thought it was really interesting because it is a personification of that moment people feel when they give in to their emotions.  Rose has broken away from society, and is opening up for the first time.  She’s free.  And what she feels like on the bow of the Titanic, flying above the world, is what people feel leading into their first kiss.

If you can guess what moment in film this is, you win major points.  Confused?  I’m not surprised.  It’s from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.  King Theoden just passed away in Aowen’s arms.  How do you express what you feel when someone you love dies?  In this case, the background is more of a personification and an amplification than an outlet for the subjet’s expression.  Wow.  That was really high brow of me.

This is another LOTR moment.  Frodo is hanging off the cliff in Mount Doom, ready to die.  Yet he finds the strength to reach out and grab Sam’s hand.  It’s a really beautiful moment, and I feel like all of us are sort of in Frodo’s position, always hanging from the edge of our own cliffs, reaching out in some way or another.

This is from Up.  I think it speaks for itself.  It’s late and I have things to do.  It’s a fantastic picture though, so don’t let my lack of a detailed explanation sell it short.

Anywhoo, I hope you enjoyed this post, and I will be updating the blog fairly soon to tell you about a few excellent websites.

2-23-2010: Three Really Awesome Flash Games

So today I’m going to talk about three really awesome flash websites that I was linked to from thefwa.com:

The Sweedish Armed Forces

So this website is really a flash game.  You connect with four other players from around the globe to complete tasks with each other.  It’s a fast game and it’s a lot of fun!  The design of the site is fairly simple, but the flash is executed extremely well.  The game itself can be a little challenging, but that’s what makes it exciting.  So if you ever have one or two minutes to spare, I recommend clicking over to this site and having some fun with people you’ve never met.

Verbatim

This is Verbatim, another fun little website that (sort of) lets you build a little monster out of technology.  You basically choose 4 objects, like tumb drives and SD cards, and it joins them together to create some feisty little creature.  They look like the smaller Decepticons from the Transformers films.  Anyway, once you’ve built your Media Monster, you can make it fight against other such creatures.  By fighting they can get stronger and such.  It’s another nice time waster.  Nothing special, but the graphics are great and the site’s design is pretty cool.

Record Tripping

This site is my favorite of the three.  With Record Tripping, you use your mouse to act as a DJ.  Except that instead of just playing around with records, you are attempting to solve marble mazes.  Also, the track playing in the background is a reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland mixed with some sort of odd music.  The music is really bizarre, and I love the idea of messing around with the text like that.  Plus the game itself is really well designed.  All in all a really fantastic game.

Hope you found this interesting and/or cool!

3-2-2010: Street/Documentary Photography

So today we turned in our street photography.  This time, 10 images were due.  So I’m going to basically post them.  If I feel the need to add some description, it will be there.  Otherwise I’ll just let the pics speak for themselves.

So obviously I didn’t think that any of these needed captions.  I hope you like them!

3-10-2010: Themed Photography – What is an artist?

Today (well, tonight, depending on how you look at it…) I am going to show you some of my theme photography.  The assignment was to turn in 10 images that pertain to a theme of your choice.

I had some ideas, and I wound up doing some photo shoots with a theme that concentrated on artists.  So these pictures deal with what it takes to be an artist, the struggle to be original, vulnerability, and other such ideas that come with being an artist.  I wanted to give a real, yet somewhat surreal look into the psychology of musicians, dancers, and actors.

So here we go!  Be forewarned, it’s a longer post.  You can skip the captions and just look at the pictures, but I really wanted to go in-depth about these images, because I’m really proud of them.

To start, we have the dancer.  I didn’t want the series to be just a bunch of downer pics, because being creative isn’t always a struggle.  It is a passion, and we find joy in what we do.  So I decided to begin with something lighter.  I really love the texture of the floor, how rough it is.  So a nice way to open the series (at least I think so.  If you disagree, let me know!)

The next picture is a little more introspective.  The mirrors worked really well in the shoot.  I actually have a couple of images that didn’t make the cut that use the studio as a reflection of the inner self.  Anyway, I felt that this was nicely framed, and fairly simple.  There is also some depth, which is nice.  Simple was really what I was going for with all of my photographs.  I don’t like clutter, so I did my best to keep everything as stripped down as I could.

This is the final dancer image.  Again, simple, but still very striking.  You feel the pain that the dancer is in.  There is a nice struggle, evidenced by the wrinkles of the ankle.  The reflection in the background is nice as well.  I wanted the mirrors to serve as sort of the ideal world, the unattainable perfection we strive for.

The musician is up next.  Now we get a little darker; the emotions are more internal than the dancer.  Still, there is a quiet concentration in her face.  She’s searching for something, some sort of melody to inspire her, and the ideas just aren’t there.  I think the blank sheet music makes a very powerful statement.  I mean, who hasn’t sat there with a blank sheet of paper in front of their face, thinking, “Time to do something original!  Too bad I can’t think of anything…”

So now we move on to something a little more aggressive.  I love that she is physically stepping on the piano.  It’s a fantastic realization of her frustration.  She’s given up, and so she’s resigned but still sort of bitter towards the instruments.  Yet her hands suggest that there’s something deeper.  It’s as if her conscience is telling her that she really shouldn’t be mad at the things that make her happy.  She’s clutching at the piano, almost embracing it.  There’s just some great conflict in this photograph.

This one is really an extension of the previous image, but I think it can still stand out on its own.  It says a lot of the same things as the other, but perhaps it is a little gentler in ways.  I love the lines in it.  Again, I had a couple other musician photographs that were really strong as well (I did more with the sheet music), but they just didn’t fit quite right with the series.

With the actress comes vulnerability.  Being on stage can really make a person feel exposed, and so I chose to play with the model being in her underwear.  I wanted to still be tasteful, as I believe that it is more about the feeling of being exposed than actually revealing everything.  The mask is also a fantastic representation of the actress’ search for the truth and the idea that one has to hide themselves from the world.

With this image, I wanted to focus on the concept of fame clashing with identity.  The mirror, with its gaudy furnishings served as a great representation of stardom.  I love how small she looks in the mirror.  Yet her view of herself is clear and in focus, so she still understands who she is.  Again, still a very simple image.  I was so happy with the way all three of my photo shoots went, and I think the work is a great testament to the people involved.

I decided to use two shots of the same pose because I felt that both of them spoke in different ways.  In the first image, the actress is hiding from herself and the audience.  This one is more confrontational.  She is directly addressing the viewer.  Still, she is closed off and vulnerable, as if she is saying, “Yeah, this is me.  I am who I am, but please, don’t judge me too harshly.”

This is the final image I chose for my series.  It’s a little more playful than the other images of the actress.  This time you can really look at her face, yet, with her being upside-down there is still an element of distortion, of changing oneself.  The lighting is also less harsh in this one, with a fantastic shade of lavender mixed with blue.  It plays off her shirt so well.  And her eyes pop wonderfully!

So that’s the end.  I hope you liked them.  And please, feel free to comment and tell me what you think!

March 30, 2010: Angels – a time lapse

I finished my time lapse!  Hope you enjoy it:

I filmed this in Central Park, at the fountain of the angel Bethesda.  The narration is taken from the end of Angels in America.  I wanted to do something simple, but powerful.  Something that was a little more personal than my last projects.  So I hope you like it!  Fell free to tell me what you think.

April 9, 2010: Surreal Photography

So this week, for Digital Media Convergence, we had to produce 5 surreal images that utilized our newfound photoshop skills.

Here’s what I came up with:

I was sifting through my pictures from Paris, and I came across this one of the Mona Lisa and the wall it’s on.  I loved that the people in the foreground were looking away from the painting, and the blank spaces on the wall made me think that this was the location of the perfect crime.

For this one I wanted to be more subtle.  Most of the people who’ve seen it can’t really tell that I did something to it.  Those are the people who can’t speak French.  Hint: Billets = Tickets.

I’ve really been getting into creating graphic art with photoshop, so this picture and the one below it are a bit more funky.  With this one, I really liked the idea of the hallway dissolving into imagination, so that’s what I did!

With this one I really just wanted to have fun.  Originally I had this shot without the animation, but the lighting on Sarah Dodge was awful (I shot the picture of Sarah back in the fall when she was talking about her Karate experience) and I loved the idea, so I decided to do some photoshop magic.

With this last image, I wanted to do something more interpretive.  Something really artsy.  I guess it’s an environment piece, sort of.  I look at it as more of escapism, but I can also see how this could be taken as more eco-oriented.

So that’s that!  Tomorrow I’m going to talk about the Third Eye Blind concert that’s happening tonight.

April 13, 2010: Lullaby – a Painting Story

Over the past few weeks (well, since the beginning of the semester), our Digital Media Convergence class has been working on painting stories.  The assignment was to take an Edward Hopper painting and add a voice over to create a story.

The painting I chose is Morning Sun.  I hope you enjoy!

So if you haven’t noticed, a lot of my work this semester has had a sort of darker, somber edge to it.  I’m not sure why that is, as a lot of my stuff tends to be more happy, but I guess I’m just going through my brooding, philosophical artist phase.

Anyway, that’s my little film, Lullaby.  I’m tempted to make it into a live action piece one day, so we shall see where that takes me.

The Art of Love

So here it is, the culmination of the semester, my final project.  Titled  The Art of Love, it is a piece about two people who have never actually been in love, and so their notion of the way romance is supposed to work is taken from the movies they see.

I think that it needs some work, but I love the direction the story is headed and I think that with some better technical aspects and perhaps a longer running time, it could really go somewhere special.