A. Our concept was to describe the rough path up towards the top, or towards the reward in the end. We thought this matches really well with the current situation we are in, having to be stuck in quarantine but we still have to move on and keep going on. We thought that this poem by Langston Hughes matches the current situation really well and we wanted to say how it’s important to keep reaching to the top.

B. We didn’t exactly have a storyboard and just had the central idea of walking up the stairs and to keep reaching to the top. Since we met for the first time on the day before the project was due, from the clips we had, we were going for a more inspirational kind of video, kind of like a motivational clip. We didn’t have much time to contact each other during the project due to quarantine and changing between hotels, but I think with what we had and for the amount of time we had, we made a pretty good film. Grant focused on editing the clips together while I put in special effects and extra effects such as the animations and graphics.

C. Grant did most of the filming work and he did the base editing while I added extra effects like the glitch effects and the typewriter effect, while also adding extra black screens and pauses. Like I said before, communication was a little bit of an issue and we only met for the first time the day before it was due, but in the end it worked out.

D. I feel like the slow effect matches with the concept really well and it adds more of the somber feeling. The extra pause in there also makes the video more somber, like the path to the top is a long and hard process, but in the end you will make it. There are also many different shots of going up the stairs, which can symbolize the many different hardships of trying to reach the top.

A. The concept for my memory was to recreate the feelings and emotions that I felt right before a marching band competition. I wanted to convey the sounds around me such as the instruments around me, while also conveying my own emotions and how it’s an exciting memory but also one that is quite stressful because of the anxiety I feel before performing in a competition.

B. I chose instrument sounds since my environment was supposed to recreate a marching band. I used my phone to record since I didn’t have any school equipment at home and mostly used things that I had around me like my brother’s instruments. The biggest problem for me was getting enough sounds to record with of high quality, because I was still at home and at that time I didn’t have accessible transportation, so I was limited to where I can go.

While editing, I played around a lot with panning since the sounds of instruments was all around me and not only in one single perspective, thus playing with panning can make it feel like I’m being surrounded with instruments. I also wanted to end it with the feeling of anxiety and everything around me is shut off, but I couldn’t quite remember how I did it in the previous sound objects I made, since it was just trial and error of reverb and echos.

C. If I had more time, I would have liked to go out a bit more and get more clips outside since marching band is an outdoor sport. I also wish I had more than just three instruments since three instruments is not all that is in marching band.

D.

In this reading, the first example of storytelling is from utilizing sound. From the emotions and tones of someone’s voice, you could create a very different yet interesting way of conveying emotions of a story. The example in the reading was an example from a book about the issues of desire and communication, and when the case has an audio that says “touch me,” it compels you to move closer to physically see what the book is about. Oral storytelling also relates around sounds, specifically the sound of words and combining them with more musical elements to display a different emotion. These days, new technology is coming out that allows us to incorporate art with technology to make an interactive art piece. Something like using technology to create a 3D piece that tells a story would be a different way than the traditional use of words and letters. Film and videos are also ways of incorporating technology and telling a story without having to use words. The website also shows a non-linear sense of storytelling, where all of the phrases have a different setting, but it makes sense in the context of the whole theme. So storytelling doesn’t necessarily have to be linear, nor do the paragraphs have to connect, as long as we can see a clear theme behind it.

One of my fondest memories of being in color guard was going to the competitions. From the start we get into a bus, students chattering about useless stuff when suddenly, the bus engine starts, signaling that we are traveling to our competition site. When we arrive, I hear the sound of footsteps walking off the bus, welcoming myself to the sound of multiple people practicing their instruments; the woodwinds, bass, drum line, percussion, etc… I hear chaperones guiding people to their warm up spots. When I arrive at our warm up spot, we slowly stretch, instructors playing music or tunes in the background for us to dance to. When we start to warm up on our equipment, all of us count together like a choir, while making sure the wind doesn’t mess up our routine. Before we compete, I can hear the audience cheering for the previous band; my adrenaline rising. Reaching the field, we can hear the other marching bands on the bleachers stomping their feet on the ground, the distinct sound of feet stomping on aluminum. When we perform, all I hear is a blur of the audience cheering, and my teammates murmuring the counts beside me. Once we’re done, I can finally relax, feeling more calm and refreshed that we finally finished for the day, ready to go back home on the bus, except this time, instead of chattering, it’s the low whispering of tired students going to rest.

The “fluidity of the digital” is the age where photography became more utilized by people to establish people’s own versions of themselves. People began to stage these pictures but the freedom of what people could publish was also diminished. In general, the concept of the photograph began to lose its aura, photography itself became more staged and lost the personal connections between the artist and the subject. In this age, the old mechanical style photographs were fluidly transitioned into digital photography that was more advanced. People were rediscovering the meaning of photography in which a camera could “write in light”. An example of old photography losing its objectivity would be during the 1990 Persian Gulf War, where softwares and technology just started coming out. During this time, most photographers were banned since television could commentate on simulations of battles going on during the war. People learned of the war through this digital photography and imaging of simulations, but banning them would block the truth and the objectives behind releasing such simulations.

As technology advances, we can use photography to start taking images of real life subjects such as the scientists using electrodes to photograph a monkey’s brain. This is one sense of capturing reality; essentially they are capturing a slice of time in the monkey’s brain and how the brain is functioning through a photograph. If we compare this kind of technology to text, videos, or books, photography for a monkey’s brain is far more advanced and intricate than what a book can describe. In this sense, photography is much more capable to capture reality than other forms of media. In recent years, computer technology and photographs have advanced to the point that cameras could replace the traditional paintbrush and canvas; we can capture an image and save it immediately instead of having to physically draw it out with some inaccuracies. These days, photography itself is becoming a language but with a limited vocabulary. Photographs may be able to capture reality efficiently, but the viewer can interpret these photographs differently and use them in different ways, which could end up causing problems in the end, something that other forms of media like text and videos won’t encounter due to the actual usage of words and speech. Photography is a new language, but it isn’t without its flaws just like any other form of media.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12N4Eu3wB6Pk7PiGi75CfO_gla1KIS_74?usp=sharing

Emily Wei Diptych Project ‘Blurred’

The relationship between my two images for the diptych is the blur for both the images but with different lighting and texture. The top one is brighter and more saturated but the objects themselves are blurry. Meanwhile, the bottom one has crisp lines for the objects but the image as a whole is cooler and grainier, making it blurred in a different way. The top image also gives an overall warm tone while the bottom one is cool and there is one stripe of highlight.

While staging the piece, I was wondering what would make it look aesthetically pleasing. When planning out my initial staging, I just made this drink and the color gradient looked really nice. I also liked the water droplets on the outside and thought it would make for a great piece to photograph. While photographing, I used a tripod so my main point was changing the aperture and shutter speed of the camera to get different lighting and focus on the objects. I purposely set the camera to a slow shutter speed and shook the camera to get the blurred effect, which I think came out nicely.

For the part 2 image, the white light in the middle was created by flashing a flashlight on the dim settings, which is actually a light flashing on and off. It created a cool center highlight portion in the image, so I decided to use that image and edited the exposure so that the highlighted portion would stand out more while the negative parts were made darker. I also overlaid a slight red color over the drinks and made the tones cooler to match the piece. Lastly, I used the lasso tool to create “shadows” on the bottom to match the shadows in the first image, except I kind of wanted an opposite effect, so I made the “shadow” out of light instead.

If I had more time, I would have wanted to get rid of the tripod and try more close ups and random zooms to see what perspective of pictures I could get. I would also want to try more advanced photoshop techniques, as I’m not so familiar with photoshop and in the past only used Procreate to lasso out portions of images.

Social Media

Social= Communication between heptapods

Media= Platform for humans/heptapods to communicate with each other

Socializing with each other=Chatting with other heptapods/ Talking about random things that happen in life/ Making new heptapods friends!/ embracing other humans or heptapods or anything’s new ideas and thoughts/ share yours as well. It is your involvement with others.

Media the platform=Offering human beings a chance to express themselves.To build social networks and encourage humans and heptapods to engage with each other’s activities and thoughts and new ideas

By Kessi, Gloria, and Emily

• Weird sounds that humans usually don’t make + doesn’t sound like they’re using a larynx
• Interacted with the aliens with “looking glasses” since the aliens didn’t want to directly interact with humans; acted as a two way communication device
• Communicated with it’s limbs (by pointing and making gestures) since they couldn’t understand each other’s language
  • Aliens seem to speak in an unknown language marked by a [flutter] sound; at least we know they speak a form of language but they seem to vary quite a bit and when the main character repeated [flutter 1] none of the aliens showed a reaction
  • But they respond to the recordings on a computer of their language
• We learn to communicate as a child from hearing other people speak (Sharon was honored pg. 7) or by pointing to things for someone else to tell us what it is
• These aliens could have some form of handwriting like the english alphabet (graphemes instead of phonemes)
  • Aliens understood what the humans wanted by observing their monitors, body language, and a little bit of their alphabet
  • Alien writing kinda logographic; their alphabet is made by combining and joining logograms with the base word “hetapod” and modifying them (rotating them) since their body has no ‘forward’ aspect to them
  • Form of writing was similar to primitive sign systems; a graphical language 
• Main form of communication was body language observing and then writing them down in both languages (jumping, walking, speaking, writing, etc… pg. 10)
• Fermat’s Principle of Least Time; heptapods definition of simple doesn’t match humans which is possibly why it was so hard to decode and learn their language 
• All of heptapod language is performative; they use language to actualize

I chose the song “Basquiat” by the k-pop group called Pentagon. 

My thought process behind this piece was based around the meaning of the lyrics. From my perspective, the lyrics portray the group trying to yell out their voice to let the public hear them, that they don’t need this crown to be successful. I interpreted this crown as something that would usually place pressure on someone, thus making the sun be made out of the word crown, like the crown is a greater force casting a shadow over the objects below it. 

Honestly, this was quite difficult for me as I never did something like this and I didn’t know how to approach it. My first few drafts were quite rough so I decided to take a step back and try to describe the song with adjectives. I ended up with adjectives like bold, powerful, loud, and resistant. I tried to take these adjectives and portray them in this piece, and I think the end result was pretty successful. 

If I had more time, I would maybe try to think about what to do with all the negative space in the middle. I know it’s meant to look like a clear sky of some sort, but maybe I can utilize more of it.