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.

Historical Script

Historical Script PDF Link

This week we made a script based off a certain aspect of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution, started at about 1910 and affected almost every person in the country for the next 30 years. Almost every man was called up to fight for one of the factions within Mexico, and these men brought with them their wives and their children. Sadly, as the war went on, many of the older children, those upwards of 11 years old, were forced to participate in the conflict. The research we found showed that children were forced into confrontations between factions called levies (http://histclo.com/country/other/mex/hist/mh-rev.html, 2008). We wanted to bring one of these innocent children into our script as a ghost in order to tell the tragic story of these kids who were pushed into the Mexican conflict.

The part of the Ghost Kid in our script is probably the youngest a child could’ve been during the revolution.Based on photographs we found through an online blog post, the character is a 10-year old with a typical revolutionary outfit, complete with white shirt, ammo belts, and a rifle (https://jaisonhist580.wordpress.com/2014/08/03/children-of-the-mexican-revolution/, Hist, 2014). The ghost, juxtaposed with the 10 year old girl Kaissa, illustrates just how innocent these children were. Kaissa still plays make believe and hide and seek with the ghost, and it doesn’t register in her mind that she is interacting with someone from 100 years ago. To think that these children were forced to shoot guns at other people is a powerful and saddening picture.

The readings for this week also helped us to contextualize the interaction between Kaissa’s mother and the Ghost Kid. The comic strip After the Deluge broke down the barriers between the general story of Hurricane Katrina and connected it with the human lives that were affected. To readers’ minds, we usually hear about big current events as overarching statements about something, rather than stories with people behind them. Kaissa’s mom doesn’t even bat an eye at the story of the children revolutionaries until she sees one right in front of her eyes. Suddenly the revolution is so real, and we realize that human beings were behind each of the facts of the event given during the museum tour earlier that day.

Our script had the purpose of giving us a face behind the story of the children revolutionaries. We hope that this piece educates people on some of the more gruesome parts of the armed conflicts that made Mexico what is today in a entertaining and thrilling way.

My Partners were Luis Puente and Mandy Shepherd