Fireside Chat

Our final assignment in this class was the fireside chat. I really enjoyed this assignment because it was so open ended and I was able to do something very specific and personal to me. I enjoyed being able to make people laugh with my sense of humor and also share a true message that I’ve learned over the years that people may not know.

When I was thinking about my assignment, I really wanted to do something that was my personal type of humor. I made the video that I showed of the candlelight vigil independent of this assignment. I just enjoyed having a moment with my brother and roommate that are in the video. It really was just a way for us to have something to talk about. For a few months the official event of the candlelight vigil for Harambe was on Facebook and it was really a fun topic of conversation for us, talking about what we were going to do, what t-shirts we were going to buy, and what we were going to say while there. It just wanted to show my classmates my inner sense of humor, and this clip was a perfect match for it.

The second part of my presentation was another look into my inner self, that I can find meaning and spiritual truth in just about everything, even the really funny things in my life. After thinking about why I enjoyed making that video so much I realized that the idea of Harambe as a person and as deserving a vigil is not real and deep down I do not believe that. What I do believe about that, however, is that the progress in my relationship with my brother and roommate improved dramatically. That progress is real, and is a very joyous relationship. I wanted to communicate that message with sharing my own personal experience with this kind of thing and then talk about popular parallels in our culture. By using images of Zelda, Star Trek, and Woodstock I reminded everyone that these fictional worlds or ideals create real relationships between people.

This project was a perfect example of how we can express who we are and what we believe through secular means. This could very well have been a lesson about the creation, and about the promises that all blessings come from God. I think that many people in the world can connect with the kind of truths that I taught during my presentation, and I think that is something I was able to do with all of my projects this semester.

Concerned Citizen

Concerned Citizen Video

The power of media can move, impress, and inspire not only an audience but also a society. In “Human Rights and Culture” we learn that media can inspire by showing the potential of humans, and what the society can become. This documentary strives to inform us of the simplicity and beauty of a woman striving to make her community better, something that creates a unique culture of love and service between BYU students and 6th graders that can’t be gained by other means.

We chose a local concerned citizen, Cora Barrett, who runs the peer mentoring program at BYU. This is a program where 6th-graders come to Brigham Young University, and with the help of their mentor, they explore different programs and activities within the college. Cora’s goal is to help all 6th graders to learn more about college and to be inspired to get a college degree.

Cora is an inspiring concerned citizen because she understands her responsibility to her community. She knows how she has opportunity to help others, especially these underprivileged elementary aged students.

In her interview, she described her frustration to those who don’t serve in their community. She talked about being a convert, and seeing many members not investing their own time in helping those outside of their congregation. She also said that the only times they would serve outside their ward was when there was a big disaster that needed a lot of help in some other country.  She was frustrated because she knew there were service projects within their own community. She felt that it was necessary to get outside of your ward, but not to step too far outside the community. The way we created this documentary, showing alternating clips of interviews mixed with real-life footage was taken from our personal experiences with the I’m a Mormon videos. These videos show the people in action, and we copied that style as we showed Cora and the children together along with the students under her supervision.

She definitely practices what she preaches. She’s helped thousands of students over the course of fourteen years, always helping the local children. She is a great example because she chooses to help those in her community, not expecting praise.

She has been inspiring to us to make a difference. In her last few thoughts of the interview, she made an admonition to all those who think that they are too busy for any type of service. Instead she explained that everybody has enough time for one hour a week, and if they did this, they would be very grateful and better because of it. By capturing this in our video, we extend that invitation to all that watch the video.

It was a great experience to learn more about this concerned citizen, and create a piece that showed the tremendous influence she has had on so many children.

My Partner was Aurelia Berryhill

Game for Change

Link to Game

This week I was able to develop a text based game about Autism. I have had first hand experience working with children with this condition, and I feel that the media really doesn't explain to us the experience of working with these children. I feel that if people were to understand more fully the way these children experience the world, that public opinion would move from skepticism to appreciation and even to increased involvement.

One of my greatest resources on autism is the book Tic Toc Autism Clock, a book written by my family friend in Missouri Elizabeth Obrey. This book talks about how each autistic child is extremely unique, and gives us questions to ask ourselves how this child perceives its world in order to know how to teach the child to develop normally. I used this book in my game when creating a fictional character based on a child that I know that has a high intolerance to social interactions. I tried to make it clear that this child does not react in normal ways to social cues or to redirection, but rather lashes out reflexively and sporadically.

This reality coincides with data found at nationalautismassociation.org, a source of information and facts about the disease. This website describes that currently there is no cure for autism, though with early intervention and treatment, the diverse symptoms related to autism can be greatly improved and in some cases completely overcome. To some people the fictional character "Charlie" might seem almost too normal. Truth be told, Charlie, or at least the real boy behind the fictional name, has progressed greatly throughout his life. He has learned to speak clearly and has learned to function well in public school. This is evident in the game when Charlie is able to communicate with the player clearly as well as do all the activities at the summer camp.

Finally, I used the article Empowering People with Autism by Presuming Competence by Rosemary Crossley as a theme for my game. Basically this article talks about the power we give to autistic people when we assume that they have the potential to be normal communicators and contributors to society. When we don't put limits on people, we allow them to reach for the same goals that we are reaching for. For that same reason, I didn't include any limitations or "restrictions" with Charlie. The player has choices to communicate with Charlie as we would with any other boy. Although Charlie doesn't respond to those things in a normal fashion, we do what we can to treat him with respect and with the hope that he will learn to respond to intelligible forms of communication.

In order to truly drive these points home, I chose to give people another story about Autism, one that is intimate and personal. Just like in the video The Danger of a Single Story, I wanted to give an alternate view on Autism than what we see in the media, which are often the most extreme cases. I wanted to show you a boy that had made progress, and that still displayed autistic tendencies but that had many of the characteristics that we see in children without Autism. I chose to use this personal approach as opposed to a political, third-party approach in order to create a more educational and impacting experience for the player. This game invites people to take the step to care for Charlie, and hopefully from their experience, learn about the challenges but also the progress that occurs in the ongoing battle against Autism.

World Building

Tabloid Article

Website

For the world builder activity this week, we started with an idea for a world where it is illegal to look at your reflection. Obviously this is something so common in our society that it was hard to imagine such a thing with mirrors literally in every building ever created. As we created our artifacts, namely a tabloid article, a preliminary architectural sketch, and a black market website, we narrowed our world down to a society where mirrors are illegal to be sold and where it is highly discouraged for one to look in the mirror.

One of the biggest influences for the choices we made in our “world” came from a similar situation in the book Divergent. In this society, there is a faction that focuses on selflessness. This faction trains their members to think of mirrors as self-indulging and vain. We tried to mimic that feel with the anti-selfie article in the tabloid. These decisions made our society more of a propaganda, program based government, rather than a totalitarian, suppressive force.

The reading for last week also influenced our creative process.The author of the design fiction article makes his main point in that the combination of fact and fiction is the best way to make a compelling, interesting world that people can contribute to outside of the original creators. We aimed to create a society that had elements of reason and logic, as well as elements of creativity and fantasy. Our original idea spawned two possible outcomes that could’ve happened: the idea of political leaders making “anti-selfie” campaigns to decrease vanity, and also the rise of a black market that sells the things that some people want but can’t have, something present in all societies. In this way, the political environment that we created subsequently created the media that we made as part of the project. The idea that a society could exist with government prohibiting, even combating the sales of mirrors is interesting, and opens the door to intelligent conversation dealing with the issues of self-centeredness and selfishness in society at large.

All in all it is most satisfying to know that we have created a world that could be potentially self-perpetuating. We realize that this twist on a modern society could be something that people continue to make media about, people far more talented at drawing, graphic design, and website building then we are. That is what we hoped to engineer, an open-ended society that people that become interested in and run with it. I mean, isn’t that what we want to do with film?

My partners were Aurelia and Isaac

Webspinna Battle

This week, Aurelia and I worked together to create an audio battle between order and chaos. We knew that these were basic ideals that have existed since the beginning of this world, and many people have tried to capture those ideals through audio. Raye and I wanted to personify these ideas while making them neutral, not allowing one to appear like the good guy or the bad guy. We were able to mix songs, movie clips, and sound effects together to create a story that brought these two ideals to life.

The way that we found the music was similar to the reading we had this past week in class, the article dealing with plagiarism. We had things that we wanted that symbolised order and chaos (ex: the preamble, chaotic entrance, and a waltz) but we never found something that wasn’t a personal rendition of an original work by someone else. Just like the man looking for the quote had to sift through a chain of edits, renditions, and paraphrases to get the original quote, we also found, in our youtube searches, lots of parodies, indirect quotations, and bad 3rd party recordings of the things we wanted. The waltz was a version by Kovacevich, the “chaos” was a clip from the movie Dinosaur, and the preamble was someone’s personal narration of the article on a video clip. Although we never created something original ourselves, the mixture of different clips was something that no one has ever done before. I’m sure no one has ever mixed an orchestra rendition of Sweet Child of Mine with a clip from Avengers: Age of Ultron.

We also found inspiration for this project from the two quotations from movies that we used in the battle. The Avengers clip that talked about humans thinking chaos and order are oppposites, and the clip from The Dark Knight discussing the potency of chaos and fear showed the two elements at their height. These movies talks about just how closely related these two forces really are. We wanted to communicate that in our battle, that Order and Chaos are powerful things, but they rely on each other to thrive. Just as Aurelia and I went to more extreme measures to communicate our message each time we messed each other's’ clips up, so do Order and Chaos reach their full potential only when they have opposition to fight against.

Our success in this performance was widely due to Aurelia and I striving to make sure that every clip, every action, and every reaction existed to ensure that the original conflict of order vs. chaos was communicated. In these days, parodies, remixes, and mashups are really only entertaining if we can see the original feeling/intent/theme behind the new content, and I think Raye and I were able to do that in our performance.

Textual Poaching

This week’s assignment had us delving into our history and finding media that we have inherited to define who we are. Whether it’s our race, our culture, or our gender, the beliefs we have in our own characteristics are byproducts of the pictures, movies, songs, and videos that have become the “standard” in defining them. Sometimes, this media, while genuine in intent, can miss the mark when they create media that is only for their group, and in doing so offend those of other persuasions. This assignment caused me to think about just what my religion, the LDS faith, has imposed images and “standards” of the Mormon member, and just how silly some of those things are.

I took some of the Mormonads that were so prevalent in the magazines of the church and aimed to illustrate the problems that teens and young adults were going through and how to deal with them. As a young child, however, I was quite disturbed by some of the images they created, and frankly didn’t understand how anyone could be inspired by the cheesy messages and phrases paired with the pictures. I also didn’t ever want my non-member friends to see them because they created such a wacky opinion of Mormons. I attempted to create Mormonads that would be funny, applicable, and also within the realm of normality and pop culture that all can enjoy.

Pairing direct phrases from the original ads with pictures of some of my favorite media, I created pictures, not of better photographical quality, but of better personal expression of both my faith and my lifestyle. Just how the velveteen rabbit may look threadbare and unappealing to outsiders, my pictures may not be the epitome of perfection. I knew that I didn’t need it to be perfect, and I probably couldn’t do it even if I tried. However, below my lack of Photoshop skills is an expression of the personal connections I make between spiritual phrases and principles and their embodiment in the media I enjoy. I can find so much inspiration from Slumdog Millionaire, and these images are my personal representations of the human clay man, the oil hands, and the butter boy. I used both the form of the original ads with the images related to my experiences with those principals to create a new set of media that fully represented my religion.

One representation of this type of textual poaching in modern day society that I can think of is the artist Meghan Trainor. Although I don’t like her music that much, I have seen her take the expectations within music that people have of the “ideal woman” and turn them on their head, creating songs and music videos that use the style and rhythm of modern pop songs and yet reflect the strong, intelligent, and successful woman that she is. I enjoy her rebuking again and again the stereotype of a perfectly slim and subservient girl, and showing just how attractive and real she can be.

I liked this assignment, and I loved being able to look at myself and find something that has influenced me that I was able to change and remix and really make it true to myself. 

Medium Specificity

Medium Specificity Audio Clip

For this week’s assignment I chose to create a humorous piece of audio similar to Looney Toon’s “Duck Amuck”. This piece was a major inspiration because it reminded the audience about the power that the creator has in the results of a cartoon. With my piece, I wanted to show just how important the sound editors and mixers are for media production. Using funny characters and even funnier pranks by the “sound guys” I made it blatantly obvious just how much of the atmosphere and effect of a show depends on how it sounds.

The reading we studied this week showed me how we can educate our viewers through humor. When we were able to see the author literally make the arguments that went into defining the term comic within the comic, we realize just how flexible the medium of comics is at describing situations and interactions. Similarly, with my piece, in seeing the juxtaposition between the characters before and after their voices are “altered” to be higher or lower pitches, we recognize the effort that is put into making someone’s voice different. The entire purpose of the conflict within the plot is to remind us how we can sometimes ignore the people behind the sound effects and music in a way that is much more interesting than hearing dialogue about it.

A major source of inspiration for this piece came from 2 songs from one of my favorite artists, Ben Rector. Two of his newer songs, The Men Who Drive Me Places, and Making Money, specifically talk about the people behind the songs he sings within the songs. The first one talks about the dedicated people who work behind the scenes to get him to his shows, and how efforts are sometimes way more honorable than what he does, yet they get no recognition. I have always been especially touched at the love and respect he shows for the people who have helped him get as popular as he is, including us the fans.

One of the biggest effects I think that Medium Specific pieces have on their audiences is their ability to appreciate the power of media. After listening to Cage’s 4’33’’ I realized just how much power that music has, so much that when there is no music, it still creates a powerful emotional response. In my piece, the music and sound had a very melodramatic effect on the characters, but behind each joke there was a truth. From the changes in volume to the background music, each one has a very powerful effect when used wisely and independently. When put together, then it becomes humorous, but only because all the reactions that Jimmothy and Andreann have are realistic responses smashed together into a 2-minute clip.